Several components are rendering: Client performance at Slack-scale
Join Jenna, founding member of Slack's frontend performance team, as she dives in and explores the performance bottlenecks they're encountering as the application and team continue to grow and evolve.
Unconventional paths in tech: Leveraging your strengths to find your place
In this talk, Mitra Raman will take a look at the many paths that engineers can take on their leadership journey. She'll look at how folks can learn into their strengths and competencies to find their next roles, or even build the roles that suit their skills.
A nudge in the right direction: How to give just enough help
In this talk, Jason will share what they've learned from the experts in hinting and some examples of how they've applied these techniques one-on-one and in designing better processes.
Becoming the leader you can be, in a changed technology industry
Over the last years, the tech industry, companies, and many of us leaders have been going through big changes: From strategy shifts and layoffs to changes in the workforce, company structures, and ways of working, to companies racing to “do something about AI.” Adapting to these changes and turning them into reality has kept many engineering leaders incredibly busy, to the point of being overworked, with not much space to reflect and make sense of it all. In this talk, Lena creates space for exactly that, by inviting you to step out of your busy day-to-day.
Retaining Your People After the Tech Boom
The tech industry has been facing new challenges: an economic downturn after a huge surge in hiring, inflation, and higher interest rates. This means that many tech companies are shifting their focus from growth to profitability. This talk focuses on how to retain your people by leading with empathy, building trust, and working with your people to understand their core motivators.
Are we doing this right? Findings from the state of feature management and experimentation report 2024
Get a sneak peek into the findings from our recent State of Feature Management and Experimentation report 2024. In this Q&A, our editor-in-chief, Scott Carey, sits down with the VP of Engineering at Harness, P.A. Masse, to discuss the biggest talking points from this report.
Cultivating ownership at any engineering level
In this talk, Rachelle will look at questions, curiosity, responding instead of reacting, gratitude, and 1:1s. She'll also discuss empowering people to decide, while making sure there's a safety net. Guardrails are crucial (as well as showing them how to ask for help).
The choice is yours – or is it? Tactics for making difficult decisions
In this talk, Leemay and Emily will give you their perspectives as a Senior Engineering Manager and Senior Staff Engineer.
The scrappy/scale mindset: A framework for sustainable engineering leadership
In this talk, Melissa will unpack the two working modes common to product engineering teams, explore what teams in each mode need from a technical leader, and learn how to adapt our own leadership style based on the context our team is in.
Ethics in the age of AI: Strategies for mitigation and their historical context
With the rapid, widespread adoption of generative AI, discussions of ethics in technology are gaining steam - and not just within engineering, but beyond in the mainstream news. And where AI has enabled incredible breakthroughs - it’s also actively caused harm, sometimes to the people it aims to protect. Christina will take a look at the imperative questions we must have around AI as engineers, looking at some of the historic harms caused by technology and how we can work to ensure that we don’t replicate them in the age of AI.
Increasing code habitability by using AI coding assistants
Will GenAI save us from this issue or cause it to proliferate? It turns out that there is a path to habitable code and, if used appropriately, AI coding assistants can help get us there.
Making do: Scaling expertise on teams you can't grow
Mica will share her experiences of working on an astonishingly small team on some of the highest-stake problems anyone could throw a computer at. She’ll talk about how it inspired a plan to create a new, flexible-model team at Slack to continuously, and creatively deliver top priorities. She will highlight the can’t-miss key points of culture-building in a tumultuous time, examine the challenges faced in adjusting to this new way of working, and go over what it means to make a flexible-model team sustainable in the long run.
Transforming legacy software: Riding the rollercoaster of emotion and innovation
Interested to hear about what Preetha did to break the logjam? Join them for a case study of one such emotionally turbulent digital transformation journey.
Safety and Belonging - A Ritual to Jumpstart Psychological Safety
Iris, engineering manager at Riot Games, will talk about how a ritual of safety and belonging brought her team closer together after "the Kotaku article" broke and trust was at an all-time low. Iris will talk about how she convinced new teams and reluctant engineers to adopt the ritual as an IC, and how she instituted and spread it across Riot Games further as a manager. This talk will give you a template for how to rebuild trust in your teams and get them working towards the same goal.
Finding balance: How to build processes that help not hurt your engineering team
In this session, Julianna will explore various examples, from cases where light processes hindered velocity and culture, to cases of excessive, heavy-handed process and strategies for adjusting course.
Managing expectations: Lessons from making large-scale platform changes
Datadog decided in 2018 to migrate all of its infrastructure to Kubernetes. And while it was a daunting technical undertaking, dealing with people and process was equally hard. Seshendra will share lessons learned from this large-scale migration, including how 2000+ engineers, across 250+ different teams made tens of thousands of changes per week to 3,000+ different workloads. He’ll give tactical tips about how to set up a project for success - and how to land it effectively.
You don't understand how trust works
In this enlightening talk, Francis will delve deep into the dynamics of trust in management, based on the insights gleaned from real-world experiences.
Making better build vs buy decisions
Chris will take a look at a decision-making framework you can employ as an engineering leader to help make better build-vs-buy decisions. He will apply this framework to some key real-world software decisions, taking a balanced look at the long-term impact of both directions. You'll leave with an actionable set of tips that can be used in your next process.
Making what you have enough: Navigating the realities of the non-boom market
The history of the computing technology industry is no different. We have had times of booms, and non-boom. As leaders we need to be prepared with tools to help us navigate the uncertainty in the current non-boom market.
Empowering developers to accelerate decentralized app development
Learn how building with React-on-Chain facilitates rapid UI development across multiple chains and offers autonomous, composable, and secure applications that unlock unique capabilities like cross-chain digital asset management, DeFi, and Social while abstracting Web3 complexities away from users with Charles Garrett.
Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety (LeadDev)
In this talk, Carol will share the story of my empirical research conducted with software engineers and developers across industries experiencing code review anxiety.
Dates and deadlines...it's complicated
In this talk, Sara Hicks will explore several communication habits that can improve communication and knowledge sharing within your team around dates and deadlines.
Spin it up, shut it down
Join Alicia and Martha as they share their insights on creating, maintaining, and gracefully shutting down teams. Learn how to set up new teams for success, keep them flexible and resilient, and understand the importance of knowing when it’s time to disband to focus on what’s most impactful.
Self-Awareness for Managers: Avoiding the antipatterns that block your team
This talk by Yaphi Berhanu will cover concrete strategies you can use today to improve your self-awareness as a manager.
Crossing the enterprise chasm
Discover how successful companies like Slack, Dropbox, and Asana transitioned from product-led growth (PLG) to enterprise scale. In this session, you'll learn proven strategies to make your app "enterprise-ready," with actionable insights you can apply right away. Ideal for technical founders, product leaders, and anyone aiming to expand their total addressable market (TAM).
Drive product gaps as an engineering leader
In this talk, Emily Thomas will discuss approachable ways an engineering leader can influence product development without stepping on toes.
Optimizing the developer experience through collaboration
In this session, learn how a collaboration-centric approach can transform the developer experience, making it easier for teams to build, test, and deploy high-quality APIs together.
Cultivating great teams: Managing out with kindness
In this talk, Marty Haught will go over a framework on how to approach managing out humanely. We'll start with the foundation of setting expectations, providing direct feedback, and working with your report to bring out their best.
Beyond the headlines: Engineering leadership in 2024
In this talk, LeadDev's editor-in-chief, Scott Carey, goes beyond the headlines using data from our 2024 Engineering Leadership report, where we asked 1,100 engineering leaders how they are feeling about the industry and their roles within it.