LeadDev Live 2020
who it's for
engineering managers, tech leads, heads of engineering, directors of engineering, vp engineering, cto, site reliability engineers
topics
rapid pivot to remote work; minimum viable business continuity planning; observability tradeoffs and SLOs; virtual interviewing and take-home tests; designing effective OKRs; accessibility automation in CI; incident drills and tabletop exercises; rebuild versus refactor decisions; deployment metrics and CI pipelines; mental health and wellbeing support; building and conveying technical vision
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| The story of a postponed conference | Ruth Yarnit | 09m |
Organizers decide to postpone Lead Dev New York and London, cite insurance excluding communicable diseases and refund liabilities, and assemble contingencies… | ||
| Engineering management in the time of coronavirus | Samuel Serban | 21m |
A crisis task force defines scenarios, spins up redundant contact channels like WhatsApp broadcast, and runs drills so no one is missing; offices close early… | ||
| Leading teams through times of uncertainty and upheaval | Christian McCarrick, Camille Fournier, Lara Hogan, Rachana Kumar | 43m |
Panel reports concrete tactics: pick one team need like predictability, publish a clear cadence (weekly becomes three or four short check-ins during crisis)… | ||
| Strategies for rapidly pivoting to remote work | Lena Reinhard, Katie Womersley, Juan Pablo Buriticá, Alice Goldfuss | 44m |
Says remote work right now is not normal and productivity drops are expected; prioritize people and pause performance reviews, add a pandemic tax to sprint… | ||
| I’m newly remote under coronavirus, AMA | Kathleen Vignos, Chris Alden, Adrian Cruz, Ale Paredes | 32m |
Rapid rollout of virtual interviewing across a company gets called out as already completed, and teams share concrete fixes: scheduled virtual coffee and five… | ||
| Powerful questions | Kristen Belcher | 10m |
Claims that asking open-ended questions rather than supplying answers increases collaboration and learning, and that powerful questions stay simple and avoid… | ||
| Minimum viable business continuity planning | Meri Williams | 17m |
Seven concrete practices cut risk: run dr. pepper sessions (scenario workshops) that list specific failure modes and acceptable recovery times; treat any… | ||
| How to do good without doing anything | Yuraima Estevez | 25m |
Claim: small automation and targeted tests prevent accessibility regressions and save time. Demonstrations use JSX accessibility, Lighthouse, react-axe and… | ||
| Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software | Jai Chakrabarti, Bryan Liles, Dan Berry, Erica Stanley | 44m |
Argues for concrete signals before rebuilding: define service level objectives and measure parity, track cycle time, bug counts, deployment frequency and MTTR… | ||
| Tradeoffs on the road to Observability | Liz Fong Jones | 27m |
Concrete claims and measurable outcomes steer the choice: a 33‑person company Honeycomb.io reports they deploy up to 10 times per day, keep change failure… | ||
| Finding potential in your interview processes | Jason Wong, Clement Ho, Dominique Simoneau-Ritchie, Shannon Hogue-Brown | 49m |
Panel gives concrete changes that move hiring from fuzzy to measurable: replace whiteboard puzzles with a merge request test project and a code review… | ||
| Designing effective OKRs | Heidi Waterhouse, Aniela Crisan, Antonio Verardi, Whitney O'Banner | 34m |
OKRs work when they state a concrete claim, show how it’s measured and what actually changed: 99% of requests under 300ms as an SLO‑style key result, an… | ||
| Apps, stacks & frameworks: Avoiding "Shiny Object" Syndrome | Angel Rivera | 36m |
Team picks MongoDB to model JSON data, ships an MVP to production and meets the deadline, then sees performance collapse after 90 days when users insert over… | ||
| Risky business: taking risks in production | Matthew Hawthorne, Leemay Nassery | 26m |
Comcast X1 ships a new personalized "For You" experience built from Spark jobs, web services and Couchbase, validated with A/B testing, rollout via canaries… | ||
| Building and conveying vision | Kevin Goldsmith, Lawrence Bruhmuller, Neha Batra, Maria Gutierrez | 45m |
Panel lays out concrete practices: a three-piece: people product profit framework to tie vision to business outcomes, treating vision as a living document with… | ||
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