LeadDev London 2023

Managing at the Threshold: Examining our Principles in a Moment of Change

Managing at the Threshold: Examining our Principles in a Moment of Change

David Yee
VP of Engineering • The New York Times

Compassionate on-call

In this talk, we’ll discuss how to build a compassionate on-call rota, and how that can help build sustainable and high performing teams.

Lisa Karlin Curtis
Software Engineer • incident.io

Red 2.0: Transforming a Game Company

A look at how the Tech Team at CD Projekt applied the Red 2.0 Manifesto as part of a company-wide transformation after the release of Cyberpunk 2077.

Colin Walder
Engineering Director, Management and Audio • CD Projekt Red

What do you mean there’s no onboarding plan for engineering managers?

Daniel Korn shares his four-week onboarding process for engineering leads that emphasizes peopleware, tech leadership, and delivery management. He provides a behind-the-scenes look at this super adaptable process, which uses a framework of ‘sessions’ and ‘experiences’ - and shares everything from his mistakes to his insights.

Daniel Korn
Director of Engineering • Lemonade

Code is Poetry

In this talk, I will talk about how to write good readable code, ticket descriptions, bug patches et al in PHP and Javascript.

Niranjan Uma Shankar
Head of Acquisition Growth Engineering • Automattic Inc

Why Onboarding to a Company's Legacy Codebase Sucks, and How to Make it Work for Your Team

In this talk, I will be discussing the history and context of the problems that plague codebase onboarding. And with problems comes solutions such as tips and tools that make it easier for engineers to onboard a legacy codebase.

Shanea Leven
Founder + CEO • CodeSee

Making the Move to Manager: Common Pitfalls for New Engineering Leaders

This talk, which will primarily focus on challenges involved with people leadership, will broadly cover: - How to rebrand yourself as a new engineering leader - How to build trust with a new team without prior experience or credibility - How to delegate effectively - How to balance proactive leadership without micromanaging.

Jacqueline Pan
Software Engineering Team Lead • Bloomberg

Marlena Lui
Software Engineering Team Lead • Bloomberg

"I'm happy where I am" - Supporting team members that aren't seeking progression

Realistically not everyone can or wants to be a Lead Engineer/Engineering Manager/Staff Engineer and nor should we be pushing people into roles they either have no interest in or have done before and not enjoyed.

Ryan MacGillivray
Software Engineer • Easol

How to drive pace in your team 🏃🏽‍♀️

By the end of the talk, folks will have received actionable advice that'll help them improve their teams' delivery and pace without a data-first approach.

Alicia Collymore
Engineering Manager • incident.io

How we support making architectural decisions

During the talk, we'll make a deep dive from the principles based on which this group operates to the specific how-to that made its work beneficial for the company and share what we've learned from this whole experience so far.

Olena Sovyn
Staff Software Engineer • Webflow

Where we’re going wrong with developer productivity

In this talk, I want to propose a different, science-backed approach to productivity using research evidence from a study with 1200+ developers: developer thriving.

Cat Hicks
VP of Research Insights & Director of Developer Success Lab, Flow • Pluralsight Flow

Engineering a more equitable hiring process

In this talk, Jason lays out some of the places where bias enters our hiring process, and shares concrete actions you can take to make your own hiring more efficient, equitable, and effective.

Jason Wodicka
Principal Developer • Advocate Karat

How to effectively “Spike” a complex technical project

In this talk, I’ll go over what a spike is, how to successfully spike a project, and lessons that I’ve learned from leading several technically complex projects, across 3 different companies, and various different teams.

Aditya Bansal
Founding Engineer • Cortex

The 9.1 Magnitude Meltdown at Fukushima

It was mid-afternoon on Friday, March 11, 2011 when the ground in Tōhoku began to shake. To the operators at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, it seemed like the shaking would never stop. The way their team operated during that fateful week has a lot to teach us about helping our own teams be at their best, both in crisis and out.

Nickolas Means
VP of Engineering • Sym

Building bridges: The art of crafting seamless partnerships between engineering, product, and design

Panel discussion

James Stanier
Director of Engineering • Shopify

Winter Wei
Senior UX Manager • Shopify

Janet Balneaves
Product Director • Shopify

Riding the rollercoaster of emotions

This talk covers key topics such as understanding and managing emotions, reflecting on them, developing emotional intelligence, and being in control of our thoughts.

Gabriel Michels
Director of Engineering • Choco

Platform engineering is all about product

You will leave this talk with: - An understanding of platform engineering and how it relates to DevOps? - What makes an IDP and a platform team successful? - Practices you can use to build a successful platform, and pitfalls to avoid.

Gal Bashan
Director of engineering • Cisco

Cultural post mortems: an approach to learning and recovering when your people systems fail

In this talk, we’ll share how we planned and executed recovery work. Our aim is to inspire you to consider a systems approach when something with your team goes wrong, and we’ll provide a template for what we think worked well.

Winna Bridgewater
Principal Engineer • Syntasso

Strategies for succeeding as a underrepresented engineering leader

I’ll be drawing on my experience as a Lead Engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and as a woman to provide strategies for how to succeed at work, alongside my own stories of how I’ve put these into practice.

Rafia Qutab Kilian
Lead Full Stack Software Engineer • NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Feature flags unleashed

In this talk, I'll show you how you can use feature flags to run complex data migrations, enable canary releases, easily build plans on top of your product, customize for specific clients, and much more.

Roger Gros
Senior Engineering Manager • Factorial

Build a data-driven on-call workflow for your team with atomic habits

This talk will walk you through a data-driven on-call framework, clearly derived from first principles. You will get the WHY, our journey towards adoption, and the results after more than 2 years of implementation.

Bianca Costache
Engineering Manager • Adobe

Keeping your team health after a layoff

In this presentation I will discuss how we can support and care for the team and then move forward, based on what I experienced at Loggi, where it was possible to overcome in a healthy way.

Leandro César Silva
Senior Engineering Manager • Loggi Tech

Parents who code: How to welcome your developers back after parental leave

I am going to talk through how you, as Development Leaders, can provide visibility of key decisions to those who have been on leave, ensure they aren’t overlooked during their period of absence and how you can prevent cognitive overload when they return, guaranteeing your best and brightest return feeling empowered, valued, and ready to code.

Sinéad Cummings
Senior Consultant • Opencast Software

Creating inclusive career ladders

In this talk, we’ll cover some common pitfalls, and will go through a practical set of prompts to help you make sure your career ladder can work well for everyone.

Sally Lait
Engineering Director – Safety & Integrity • Bumble

Building for the Underserved, Solving for All

This talk will remind us about the levels and weight of responsibility we carry as builders and leads in tech, zero in on the need for prioritising people-centric approaches in the design and development decisions we make everyday and implore us to move beyond only employing best practices in our work.

Serah Njambi Kiburu Senior Developer Advocate • Spotify

Driving positive change through performance improvement plans

This talk describes an approach to PIPs in which the manager helps to set the employee up for success.

Cristina Yenyxe Gonzalez Garcia
Director of Engineering • eyeo

Exit plans and how to talk about them

This talk covers why the answer to that question is important, how to set up the culture to enable the conversation, how to actually have the conversations once the foundation is laid, and the benefits that both employees and the company get out of it.

David Kiger
Director of Engineering • Yelp

Orchestrating thousands of bots from the cloud

We now provide an end-to-end platform for smart online grocery to some of the world’s largest grocery retailers. At the heart of our model are automated warehouses which are the most advanced of their kind. Thousands of bots collaborate seamlessly on 3D grids to fulfil customer orders.

James Donkin
CTO • Ocado

The awful agony of the app store: When software delivery goes wrong

This talk is a dramatic tale of ups and downs, tears and triumph, and the very sharp end of the sunk cost fallacy. Via the rollercoaster ride of a failed iOS app, Clare uses the experience to highlight several key components that contribute to successful software development… and offer understanding to those facing obstacles beyond their control.

Clare Sudbery
Independent Technical Coach • Sudbery Software Engineering Ltd