LDX3 London 2025
2025-06-16..2025-06-17
London, United Kingdom
[LeadDev London 2022, LeadDev London 2023, LeadDev London 2024, LDX3 London 2025, LDX3 London 2026]
as the organisers put it
Talks on three stages and activities across two floors, explore the latest practices for building effective software engineering orgs.
who it's for
engineering managers, platform engineers, senior engineers, developer experience engineers, site reliability engineers, tech leads, people managers
topics
cross-platform mobile strategy evaluation; hybrid service-oriented and microservices; organizational decision records; LLM-driven environment setup and coding; observability-driven culture and tooling; cloud cost auditing and optimisation; trunk-based development and CI/CD; feature flags and dark launches; repository health at scale; postmortems and incident learning; inclusive hiring and neurodiversity leadership
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Optimization of mobile development strategy for maximum business impact | Sasha Denisov | 25m |
Decision criteria are: concrete claims, measurable outcomes, and tools used. Slides show 1.2–1.5x per-developer gain from process fixes, then a customer case… | ||
| How to keep everyone happy (on a shoestring)? | Neslihan Şirin Saygılı | 20m |
A midsize SaaS quarter spirals into an avalanche: an accidental AWS bill that blows budget, key engineers leaving, security bounty emails and a Black Friday… | ||
| Growing pains: Scaling and re-architecting systems under fire | Vicki Kalmanovich | 14m |
A small startup’s reviews collection platform suddenly needs to scale after a Walmart acquisition, and the core claim is that continuous stakeholder buy-in… | ||
| Were our values a lie? Leading teams through diversity’s collapse | Elvira Khamsin | 06m |
Argues that three causal mechanisms link diversity to performance — inclusive leadership, structured hiring, and early-career inclusion — based on… | ||
| Building scalable systems in a complex compliance world | Yinka Omole | 23m |
Shows concrete patterns that work: state machines and shared compliance libraries model multi-step onboarding and reuse salary or payroll rules across… | ||
| How a team that communicates well collaborates well | Mathias Meyer, Sara Hicks | 26m |
A team drops repeated handoffs so a few concrete fixes get tried: a style guide to unify voice, three priorities instead of a premature north star, and a tiny… | ||
| Organizational evolution: From products to user needs | Eugene Sergueev | 20m |
Claims a concrete path: Flo Health moves from functional teams to product teams to a Jobs‑to‑be‑Done user‑centric model while serving 70M+ monthly users, using… | ||
| Rethinking collaboration: LLMs, teams, and cognitive load | Sara Dolganov | 10m |
Claims concrete methods and limits: LLMs handle environment setup, company docs and quick PoC code so engineers avoid context-switching and reduce cognitive… | ||
| Honey, I shrunk the bill! | Harjot Singh Parmar | 24m |
Examples land fast: a single 22‑second query costs $10K, a two‑week data‑lake job runs $75K, a forgotten VM bills $45K, and one BigQuery run hits $4K on an… | ||
| So you want to hire engineering force multipliers? | Hazel Weakly | 26m |
Hiring these platform and DX force multipliers proves unusually hard and likely to burn hires out unless interview design and org signals align. The talk… | ||
| Beyond “try harder”: Effective strategies to tackle bugs | Andy Weir | 10m |
Claims concrete results: test suite drops from 30+ minutes to under five (local feedback under one minute), saving about 20 hours per developer per month… | ||
| Monolith-ifying perfectly good microservices | Brian Scanlan | 26m |
Intercom reimplements standalone services back into a single Ruby on Rails monolith and reports clear wins: moved webhooks from Java into Rails, 2.5 million… | ||
| How to maintain a codebase – when everyone can code | Matt Collier | 12m |
Vercel demonstrates a concrete pipeline: observability as machine input where logs, metrics, traces, feature‑flag telemetry and experiment results feed JSON… | ||
| Hear from our charity partner CodeYourFuture | Germán Bencci | 11m |
CodeYourFuture builds a tailored pipeline with a partner to move trainees into real engineering roles and it gives childcare so parents can join. A three month… | ||
| From 0 to 10,000 experiments | Aaron Silverman | 11m |
Claims a path from 0 to 10,000 experiments by combining feature flags, an experimentation platform that standardizes statistical evaluation, and automated… | ||
| Going all-in on data products | Thomas Inman | 26m |
Auto Trader builds a rich event stream alongside the operational product, emitting an event whenever state changes, pushing it down an event bus and ingesting… | ||
| Rebuilding trust: Leadership after layoffs | Phillipa Rodney | 24m |
A four‑part REST framework claims to rebuild psychological safety and operational clarity after layoffs by doing concrete things: attend HR meetings and keep… | ||
| Everything you always wanted to know about game engines | Dan Webb | 14m |
Game engines claim to be GPU‑native, multi‑threaded platforms with built‑in rendering, physics, audio and profiling so production workflows and engine… | ||
| The creative technologist | Corey Leigh Latislaw | 26m |
Practical claim and concrete results: documents shipping 50 proofs of concept in nine months and 2 million in new work, with blueprints, inner‑source tooling… | ||
| Fast, informed, impactful: How to master decision-making | Katrin Freihofner | 20m |
Seventy-five-plus interviews produce concrete fixes: a reusable template with motivation goals non-goals design risks open questions, explicit role mapping via… | ||
| How to zoom out (and when to stop) | Neef Rehman | 14m |
Experience moving from IC to manager at ~20-person startups shapes concrete advice: add new responsibilities to a triage list, delegate items that don’t affect… | ||
| Balancing autonomy, technical alignment, & speed through strategic collaboration | Elín Torfadóttir | 27m |
Concrete claims and operational details: Spotify runs ~25 Technical Steering Groups and maintains 100+ ADRs; Core Infrastructure TSG acts as a virtual tech… | ||
| Managing diverse engineers for high-impact deliveries | Amtul Haq Ayesha | 23m |
Teams adopt an async-first culture with Jira action lines that include time zones (e g Confluent CFKA at 1600 CCT), use Slack Donut for random coffee pairings… | ||
| Practical advice for technical decision-making while evolving systems in place | Inés Sombra | 28m |
Fastly describes concrete outcomes: a metrics pipeline receiving thousands of emitters grows from 40 to 340 metrics, shifts aggregation from per-second to… | ||
| Human-first leadership, AI-powered | Sterling Chin | 27m |
Claims concrete wins: a 21‑person Labs group ships seven zero-to-one products in 2.5 years while cutting managerial busywork and reclaiming mornings. Describes… | ||
| Building the AI enablement playbook | Maria Gutierrez | 25m |
Personio builds a lightweight enablement playbook: trial cohorts, an AI usage policy, budgeted rollouts and quick procurement/security guardrails that prevent… | ||
| Creating the next generation of Senior Engineers | Alasdair Smith | 10m |
Claims that pedagogy yields actionable leadership tools backed by practice with Code Your Future and a milestone of 300 grads hired A concrete toolkit emerges… | ||
| Accessibility of codebases: Leader’s perspective | Osada Paranaliyanage | 10m |
Claim: making a codebase approachable cuts incidents, shortens onboarding, and raises velocity by shrinking unknowns and knowledge silos. Specifics: measure… | ||
| Training innovation: The key to long-term success | Mykola Kondratiuk | 11m |
Claims that innovation is a trainable skill backed by 84% vs 6% (importance vs satisfaction) and a repeatable process. Implements protected time, weekly or… | ||
| Becoming an AI engineering company | Ben Seymour | 23m |
Claims that companies must adopt an AI engineering paradigm with tight feedback loops and continuous releases; describes an open‑source AI SDK (npm i ai)… | ||
| Neurodiversity: From struggles to solutions, tips for leading a team | Stacey Nutbrown | 10m |
Reframes neurodiversity as accessibility and delivers 8 practical tips aimed at leaders, not theory. Shows how to apply engineering habits — set clear… | ||
| Getting excited about maintaining legacy systems | Blanca Garcia Gil | 27m |
Argues that maintaining legacy systems requires three concrete skills: optimism as a tool for curiosity, systems thinking to map architecture, and disciplined… | ||
| Being secure by design: Engineer-led security | Dan Abel | 24m |
A small engineering security team proves out a two‑engineer PoC for six months then expands to four and scales impact across ~50 remote engineers by providing… | ||
| Documentation and AI: How to write right now | Heidi Waterhouse | 24m |
AI excels at crawling and extracting and indexing 80GB corpora, templating predictable outputs like security release notes and SDK translations, and doing… | ||
| From code to commerce: Engineering’s role in driving business growth | Rodney Woodruff | 26m |
Concrete outcomes and engineering moves: a platform serving three million merchants undergoes a database redesign, theme precompilation, vCPU upgrades… | ||
| Better software faster | Laura Tacho | 24m |
A concrete checklist: adopt the Core 4 (speed, effectiveness, quality, impact) with the provided survey template and benchmarks, measure developer friction… | ||
| The performance curve: A legacy model in modern disguise | Alex Karp | 24m |
Argues that the performance curve is mathematically flawed yet endures under new names, tracing a lineage from Jack Welch’s GE 20/70/10 era through Microsoft’s… | ||
| The five stages of workplace culture | Zoe Cunningham | 12m |
Softwire claims back-to-back #1 UK’s 100 Best Large Companies to Work For (2023, 2024) after twenty years of deliberate changes. The five-stage hierarchy moves… | ||
| From monitoring to mastery: Building an observability-driven culture | John Doran | 16m |
Phorest shifts observability from alerts to outcomes: they adopt OpenTelemetry and Honeycomb, define an appointment screen under 1s SLO (two‑week window), and… | ||
| 3 lessons every engineering leader needs in 2025 | Lucas Mendes | 10m |
Over 50 engineering leaders surface concrete patterns for 2025: 68% use AI for boilerplate code, 45% use AI for docs and search, 41% experiment with AI for… | ||
| Don’t get toasted: A leader’s guide to mental well-being | Dominika Rogala | 12m |
Actionable checklist: run a quick self-scan and keep a printed feelings and needs list, pick three go-to chargers (singing, puzzles, nature cited), identify… | ||
| One does not simply... rebuild a product | Prakriti Mateti | 26m |
Culture Amp is rebuilding its second‑largest product (performance) from scratch to reach a $3b market, after thousands of customers and 850–1,500 review cycles… | ||
| Beyond the headlines: Engineering leadership in 2025 | Scott Carey | 11m |
Survey of 1,000+ engineering leaders presents concrete numbers: 54% expect no headcount change in 2025, while 60% say AI has not significantly boosted team… | ||
| Rebuilding at scale: A CTO’s journey in a high-growth fintech | Lee Provoost | 26m |
A fintech rebuild actually moves £15 billion of client assets through a 16-month rebuild that finishes and carries production traffic, not just diagrams. The… | ||
| Rethinking measurement for high-performing teams | Oge Opara-Nadi | 25m |
Combines SPACE and DORA signals with concrete actions: a spike in cycle time reveals PR-review heroes bottleneck and empowering the whole team reduces review… | ||
| Accessibility needs better marketing | Manuel Cheța | 24m |
Repackages WCAG into four impact groups and runs a company access mundi (weekly guild, 70 recorded workshops) using simple tools: keyboard and screen‑reader… | ||
| Tracking repository health at scale | Simon McManus | 25m |
Trainline defines repository health programmatically, running checks (node LTS, dependency drift within two major versions, GitHub permissions, security audit… | ||
| The sprinter’s leadership mindset | Ugo Anomelechi | 11m |
Claims that sprint phases map to leadership are backed by concrete moves: when centralizing engineering across markets with no blueprint, the team kicks off… | ||
| What’s my job again? Developing self-management | Cate Huston | 15m |
Argues that leadership is practical: define and shift your job to meet product and technical needs, expand range using Daniel Gleman's six leadership styles… | ||
| Y2K: The bug that didn't bite | Amir Safavi | 24m |
Year 2000 risk is a concrete case study: legacy COBOL and firmware on IBM 1401s with 16 kilob of memory force two‑digit years, fixes include date expansion… | ||
| How to make the perfect decision | Andrew Harmel-Law | 12m |
Argues there is no perfect decision and the concrete rule is code wins arguments: build a spike or minimal implementation, get it into an environment that… | ||
| Shaped by demand: The power of fluid teams | Daniel Terhorst-North | 24m |
Claims a concrete alternative: quarterly Demand-Led Planning where 20–200 people re-team around all demand, not just features, and allocate discretionary spend… | ||
| Effortless execution: Designing processes that don’t need babysitting | Antonia Scheidel | 28m |
Built a script that pulls from the experiment tracker into the project system to auto-generate stakeholder notes, cutting manual prep by up to two hours a week… | ||
| High-potential engineers for high-impact roles | Germán Bencci | 10m |
A charity-run pipeline with Code Your Future builds a three-month intensive core + nine-month internship that trains for systems roles, teaches C++ to… | ||
| The million dollar bug: Quality leadership lessons from costly failures | Christine Pinto | 24m |
CrowdStrike suffers a $5.4B outage and Sonos incurs a $500M crisis after rushed rollouts; one refund of €200k (refunded) uncovers a $30M exploit risk… | ||
| Frictionless movement: How internal mobility transforms engineering culture | Tom Murton | 11m |
Claims that internal mobility boosts retention and saves money with concrete numbers: employees stay 41% longer at companies with high internal mobility… | ||
| I’m 83% confident this’ll be useful | Sean Bolton | 10m |
Claims that a simple probabilistic question improves estimates using Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets framework, demonstrated with an 83% opener and an 80%… | ||
| Balancing direction and empowerment | Lara Hogan | 24m |
Argues that managers must shift between empowerment and directive modes and gives concrete tactics: decide the optimization (e.g., forward progress), craft a… | ||
| Software engineering with GenAI | Gergely Orosz | 27m |
Executives claim things like 30% of code written by AI and forecasts of near‑total automation, but engineers report mixed reality: agent experiments sometimes… | ||
| A quick tour of delivery management (and why it matters) | Patrick Kua | 26m |
Four concrete moves decide whether to watch: a four-step recipe that actually names actions — build an accurate plan that answers five questions (outcome… | ||
| In praise of “normal engineers” | Charity Majors | 31m |
Argues that excellence comes from systems not unicorn hires and claims a huge competitive advantage from designing for normal engineers who can ship, observe… | ||
| Escaping the rewrite trap | Camille Fournier | 26m |
Organizations choose rearchitecting over full rewrites because rewrites routinely miss hidden behavior and fail — an 80% hackathon rewrite claim at Rent the… | ||
| Leader or engineer? Navigating our technical identity crisis | Marcus Gardiner | 12m |
A concrete claim: you cannot be five‑out‑of‑five everywhere, so deliberate choices beat drifting. The initiative deploys a map and self‑assessment across ~52… | ||
| Navigating LLM deployment: Tips, tricks, and techniques | Meryem Arik | 28m |
Regulated customers block public AI APIs, so teams move to self-hosting to keep data and IP on-prem or in VPCs and to avoid rate limits. The stack includes… | ||
| From dashboard soup to observability lasagna: Building better layers | Martha Lambert | 26m |
A concrete process claims to turn “dashboard soup” into a usable stack: a TDD-like predict, prove, measure loop with hands-on drills and quarterly game days… | ||
| Lost and alone over the Pacific | Nickolas Means | 37m |
Tells the full, concrete rescue: an ADF failure leads to a 23‑hour ferry flight with zero fuel left, VHF range and signal loss used to localise the Cessna, a… | ||
| 10 things nobody tells you about OKRs | Neil Vass | 27m |
A clear claim: OKRs sometimes trigger instant company pivots — Intel in December 1979 reorients 2,000 people within months — and sometimes they coexist with… | ||
| Levelling up: Transitioning successfully into a manager of managers role | Gisela R | 23m |
A practical playbook for the manager-of-managers transition: concrete timeline (promotion from managing one team to five within 12 months and promotion to… | ||
| Using postmortems to break out of infinite loops | Adnan Karač | 12m |
A concrete story shows a read replica accidentally becoming primary, a long SELECT count() triggers a payments outage, and the postmortem evolves from blaming… | ||
| How to delete everything: The clean-slate approach to technical strategy | Plum Ertz | 24m |
Clean-slate exercises uncover concrete options: a legacy Python service audit reveals 31 individual functionalities, shows which logs and partners break, and… | ||
| How Monzo tolerates full cloud outages | Andrew Lawson, Daniel Chatfield | 21m |
Monzo builds an independent backup bank called Monzo Stand-in running in Google Cloud while the primary platform stays in AWS, with only 18 services and… | ||
| Rethinking growing engineers in the age of AI | Meri Williams | 23m |
Claim: entry-level hiring falls sharply — a 73.4% drop in starter hiring — as AI takes on traditional junior work, and other fields report real harms from… | ||
| Dressing to the 9s | Mark Robinson | 23m |
Claims concrete steps: switch focus from reliability to resiliency, automate automated rollback and watch sev zeros recover in minutes, enforce defaults like… | ||
| From autocomplete to agents: AI coding assistance state of play | Birgitta Böckeler | 26m |
Overview focuses on concrete claims and demos: measurable speedups (optimistic 13% ballpark from earlier marketing but typical 5–12% observed), live agent… | ||
| Theory to action: Architecting and implementing your team operating system | Meg Adams | 27m |
Claims a workable method to document and iterate a team operating system by naming four concrete components — people, structure, setting, norms — and gives a… | ||
| FORTRAN’s AI Playbook: Leadership lessons from history | Anjuan Simmons | 27m |
Claims that FORTRAN slashed coding and debugging to under 20% of prior effort, was developed for the IBM 704/7090 mainframes, and proved at the 1957 Western… | ||
| Becoming AI engineers | Lawrence Jones | 26m |
Claim: a production-ready automated incident investigation and resolution system is built over 18 months that routinely runs ~109 LLM calls per investigation… | ||
| Debugging the most critical relationship in your work life | Lena Reinhard | 27m |
Clear, testable tactics: a one-page worksheet and a weekly reporting template (email format: goals status impact asks), a peer-meeting email template to run… | ||
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