LeadDev London 2024
2024-06-11..2024-06-12
London, United Kingdom
[LeadDev London 2022, LeadDev London 2023, LeadDev London 2024, LDX3 London 2025, LDX3 London 2026]
who it's for
engineering managers, tech leads, senior engineers, director of engineering, data and ML leaders, platform engineers, people managers
topics
managing migrations; setting goals with resistant people; delivery metrics and measurement; tech debt as innovation; neurodiversity in tech; AI-native engineering teams; technology radars for decisions; scaling data and ML teams; mentorship and sponsorship; developer experience improvements; delivering features for big events; managing across timezones
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem | Alessandro C | 11m |
Being good yourself isn’t enough to stop toxic managers; the claim is actionable: identify incidents, escalate to the boss, mentor peers and give structured… | ||
| Managing the marathon: Leading teams through migrations | Lawrence Taylor | 13m |
A team leads a multi-year migration that retires a legacy system for a new acquired stack, reconciling 70 million data points and costing decades of… | ||
| How to set goals with people who don’t want to set goals | Alicia Collymore | 11m |
Three-step process produces three concrete goals and a reusable backlog using Post-it notes or Miro whiteboards: brain dump to pull career and personal ideas… | ||
| The Boss's Shoes Don't Fit: And Other Surprises of Leadership | Inna Weiner | 14m |
Becomes boss of a 50+ person org and discovers every question sounds amplified 10x, so the concrete change is to speak less, listen more and only ask questions… | ||
| The Post Office Scandal | Hywel Carver | 15m |
Horizon (Fujitsu) misreports branch balances across 11.5k UK outlets, the system’s bugs lead to 983 convictions and ~4,000 people affected, with bankruptcies… | ||
| Measure for change | Laura Tacho | 23m |
Claims that metrics must tie metrics to decisions, involve teams, and always follow up; measurement alone does not improve outcomes. Examples and numbers… | ||
| Demystifying neurodiversity in tech with nostalgic video games | Parul Singh | 24m |
Claims that 53% of tech workers are neurodivergent and only 3% disclose it, explains why a barrier-based approach matters, and shows concrete wins: a timeboxed… | ||
| Delivery metrics - the good, the bad and the utterly ridiculous | Jennifer M. | 12m |
Counts actual tickets (about 30 tickets per sprint), tracks a goal ratio for what proportion of sprint work maps to product goals, and reports sprint… | ||
| The tech-powered blueprint for careers clarity at ASOS | Ed C., Gareth W. | 26m |
ASOS builds a competency framework into a web app backed by Blazor Server App and a Git repo of GitHub markdown that converts to JSON and lands in Azure file… | ||
| Tech debt as innovation, reframing this forever problem as an opportunity | Bruce W. | 26m |
Claim: technical debt is a natural by‑product of software innovation and can be an innovation vehicle when treated specifically. Examples: modernising a 17–18… | ||
| How do you deliver a feature on the biggest stage in the world? | Josh McNamee | 12m |
Disguise uses Single Large Canvas to calculate exactly which input pixels each of 23 disguise servers needs to fill the Sphere’s 16k interior so a single 16k… | ||
| Managing across timezones; A retrospective | Matt Boyle | 10m |
Manages 12 engineers across four timezones (San Francisco, London, Austin, New York) and reports six concrete lessons: reserve a weekly golden hours slot, use… | ||
| Making smart investments: A framework for maximizing your ROI in technical decisions | Katerina I. | 25m |
Built a state‑of‑the‑art machine learning model, spent about half a year coordinating with a features team, ran AB tests and finds little to no impact, so the… | ||
| Building high performance, AI-native engineering teams | Jared Palmer | 25m |
Vercel rearchitects for AI by treating evals as automated tests, using Brain Trust for a test harness, and storing model configs in feature flags at the edge… | ||
| How to use technology radars to make transparent tech decisions | Andra Blaj | 11m |
Medic documents technology choices for a 100‑person global team with two public radars — CHT Technology Radar for Implementers and CHT Technology Radar for… | ||
| Build great engineering teams and have a positive social impact | Germán Bencci, Seraphine Young | 11m |
An organization trains refugees, migrants and low‑income people into tech with part‑time, cost‑free courses that provide laptops childcare transport and… | ||
| Embracing engineering’s place at the forefront of business | Renee Hunt | 17m |
Claim: engineering must stop being a back office and lead the business, taking ownership of product impact and ethics around GenAI. Evidence: a mid‑sized… | ||
| Mentorship + Sponsorship | Lara Hogan | 25m |
Distinguishes mentorship from sponsorship: mentors give perspective, sponsors give opportunity. Presents claims with evidence: sponsors directly affect… | ||
| The software bug all stars - and what we can learn from them | Christian S. | 26m |
Mars Climate Orbiter loses a $300 million probe because teams mix imperial vs si units and management blocks a fast fix; Therac-25 delivers fatal radiation… | ||
| Uncertainty of change | Jitesh Gosai | 31m |
The claim is that uncertainty, not change, drives fight/flight/freeze responses and poor decisions: historical cases show Ned Lud–style riots, Sears shifts… | ||
| You are here: The story of The Barbican | Nickolas Means | 34m |
A precise story of decision and craft: a 35-acre Barbican estate delivers 2,113 flats, three schools, the Guild Hall and a 2,000-seat concert hall after 20+… | ||
| Data science demystified | Grishma Jena | 19m |
Claims that 2023 produces 120 zettabytes a year and that value comes from turning raw streams into decisions via a concrete pipeline: fetch, wrangle, explore… | ||
| The LeadDev Engineering Management Report 2024 | Lena Reinhard, Scott Carey | 30m |
Survey of 1,117 engineering leaders with 602 qualitative data points reports concrete shifts: larger firms show budget and headcount cuts while some small… | ||
| Practical steps to establish and scale your data & ML team | Ellissa V. | 28m |
Builds a one-person data team into a scaling function by shipping an MVP data platform, proving value with an automated forecasting pipeline live by end of… | ||
| From overload to oasis: Creating more time for the cool stuff | Dominika P. | 09m |
Claims that delegating monotonous but valuable work frees time for more creative work and reduces burnout, and offers a cheeky adaptation of the Convey Matrix… | ||
| Building for the new developer | Cat Hicks | 29m |
A large empirical study of more than 2,400 developers finds about 43% report an AI skill threat—fear their careers or skills are at risk—and higher personal or… | ||
| Embracing engineering’s place at the forefront of business | Renee Hunt | 17m |
Argues that technology is the business and engineering must lead strategic decisions not just run systems, backing that with concrete moves: a company-wide… | ||
| How do you deliver a feature on the biggest stage in the world? | Josh McNamee | 12m |
A team turns a single 16k hemisphere into deliverable inputs by using Single Large Canvas to slice a huge master into per-server segments and a purpose-built… | ||
| nothing matches | ||