I was fortunate enough to spend the last couple of days at Lead Developer 2017 in London. The conference has been described as a leadership and management conference dressed up as a technical conference. It’s one of my “must-attend” conferences of the year.
There were some clear themes from the talks this year, with perhaps the strongest message coming across that as technical leads and managers it’s own responsibility to build safe, inclusive environments where people can thrive. Carly Robinson delivered her excellent talk on “Mentoring Junior Employeers at Slack HQ” which included references to the importance of a supportive environment for entry-level developers. Also on this theme, Jill Wetzler used empirical evidence in her talk “Tips for Building Diverse Teams” to show the issues that under-represented people face in STEM environments.
Another key themes was the need for leaders to be deliberate in the way they communicate. Adrian Howard showed how lessons learnt from conducting user research can be applied to your one-on-ones in his talk “How to Talk to Earthlings”, Katherine Wu (“Ask v Guess Cultures”) and Mathias Meyer (“Building and Scaling a Distributed and Inclusive Team”) both talked about the impact of culture on communication, and Erika Carlson gave the audience a set of clear actionable techniques for improving giving and receiving feedback in her talk “Better: Fearless Feedback for Software Teams”. I’m really looking forward to this video being available to rewatch and share with my teams.
Lara Hogan put a different spin on the leader’s role in communication, wrapping up the conference with “Leading by Speaking” which gave advice on building and delivering a great speaking performance when under the spotlight. I found this a great way to round off the conference and the next book on my reading list is Lara Hogan’s book Demystifying Public Speaking.
Aside from these key themes, I found Cate Huston’s talk on mobile application development (“YOLO Releases Considered Harmful”) particularly relevant to me. In the last year I’ve moved from web application development (YOLO Dev), into the world on packaged software where you don’t own the update cycle and process. The majority of talks at conferences have the inbuilt assumption that audience are building web applications and I found it good to see someone talking about a different (more relatable to me) set of challenges.
Finally, I couldn’t complete a field report without mentioning Nickolas Means’s talk on “The Original Skunk Works” at Lockhead Martin. Nickolas told the audience of the struggles engineers encountered in building supersonic jets, with very little resources and to tight timescales. He showed that the lessons from Lockhead Martin and “Kelly’s rules” are practices that are applicable to software development, and the way we build teams. Nickolas has a fantastic ability to tell a story, and I’d recommend taking the time to hunt out some of his previous talks.
This was the third year of Lead Dev in London, and my third year in attending. Each year the content has got better, and each year I come away with new ideas and techniques to apply. What’s more, I come away with verification that I’m doing the right things, and to put it the way of one of the speakers - “this is my tribe”.
Leadership and management is a craft. Moving from a senior developer to a technical manager is a career shift, not a promotion. Events like Lead Dev give me a chance to interact with others who have reset their career and to continue hone my craft. It also gives me the chance to hear about the challenges that others face and build out a network of folks going through similar things to myself.
Lead Dev London 2018 was announced (although no dates yet), along with further events in New York and Austin. More information about the conference, including speaker bios, schedule and event notification can be found on the Lead Dev website.
