LeadDev New York 2024
2024-09-04..2024-09-05
New York, United States
[LeadDev New York 2022, LeadDev New York 2024, LeadDev New York 2025]
who it's for
engineering managers, tech leads, people managers, senior software engineers, staff engineers, platform engineers, product managers
topics
AI coding assistants; code habitability improvements; legacy software transformation; developer experience collaboration; psychological safety rituals; cultivating ownership on teams; managing expectations effectively; retaining engineering talent; scaling expertise on small teams; decentralized app development; build versus buy decisions; code review anxiety interventions
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Finding balance | Julianna Lamb | 27m |
Argues that the right balance is concrete: a staged lifecycle of one-pager → PRD → tech spec with templates, heavy doc-driven design and a spec-first cadence… | ||
| Transforming legacy software | Preetha Ramaswamy | 25m |
Legacy code causes cognitive overload and builds up emotional debt that blocks change, so a dedicated multi‑disciplinary team forms, applies stricter WIP… | ||
| Making what you have enough | Tobi Ogunbiyi | 18m |
A fintech customer-facing service hits capacity, takes 10 hours to restore, and forces an 18‑month deadline to rearchitect from a rigid server stack to a… | ||
| Increasing code habitability by using AI coding assistants | Paul Sobocinski | 22m |
Claims that AI coding assistants can improve habitability by concrete edits and tests using GitHub Copilot are demonstrated in a Ruby URL shortener demo where… | ||
| Several components are rendering | Jenna Zeigen | 27m |
Slack desktop suffers systemic re-renders from a Redux+React architecture so the client performance team builds observability, surfaces input delay key press… | ||
| Cultivating ownership at any engineering level | Rachelle Jensen | 27m |
Offers seven concrete techniques: ask for three possible solutions to force trade‑off reasoning, use curiosity and respond don’t react with impact questions… | ||
| Ethics in the age of AI: Strategies for mitigation and their historical context | Christina Entcheva | 21m |
Claims that technology is neutral get challenged with concrete examples: PredPol <1% accurate (0.4% overall in Wired’s analysis of ~24,000 predictions), a… | ||
| Retaining your people after the tech boom | Kat Ross | 11m |
Claims concrete actions: lead with being a human person (vulnerability and listening) and use personalized motivator profiles—affiliation security autonomy… | ||
| Making do: Scaling expertise on teams you can't grow | Mica Alaniz | 28m |
Claim: rebuild team structure not headcount. Concrete actions include migrated legacy warehouse into Google BigQuery using Python SQL Airflow and Terraform and… | ||
| Managing expectations | Seshendra Nalla | 25m |
Datadog migrates its infrastructure to Kubernetes starting 2018 and builds a new Deployment Platform that must absorb 2000+ engineers across 250+ teams making… | ||
| Self-awareness for managers | Yaphi Berhanu | 27m |
Claim: being generous with decisions can secretly slow teams — opening every choice drags meetings and adds mental labor. Concrete tools: make it safe to… | ||
| A nudge in the right direction: How to give just enough help | Jason Wodicka | 14m |
Presents a concrete, repeatable model that turns a quick unblock into real learning: use hands-off engagement, leading with questions, and present evidence… | ||
| Safety & Belonging - A ritual to jumpstart psychological safety | Iris Zhang | 10m |
After Kotaku exposes abuse, a team builds a recurring ritual called Safety and Belonging that uses a 3-part workshop sequence (intro/trust, feedback… | ||
| Drive product gaps as an engineering leader | Emily Thomas | 10m |
Engineering leaders who hit product gaps get specific: after six months without a PM they run customer calls, sit in all‑hands, and keep recurring… | ||
| Cultivating great teams: Managing out with kindness | Marty Haught | 11m |
Argues that managing someone out is a humane, concrete process built on three blocks: trust via authentic one‑on‑ones, set written expectations and review… | ||
| The choice is yours – or is it? | Emily Samuels, Leemay Nassery | 26m |
Decision-making examples land on specifics: a platform team at Spotify consolidates distributed filtering logic into an existing backend service consolidation… | ||
| Becoming the leader you can be, in a changed technology industry | Lena Reinhard | 24m |
Eighty‑four percent of leaders report role changes and 63% report wider scope, with 28% spending at least 30% of their time differently and 48% having more… | ||
| Beyond the headlines: Engineering leadership in 2024 | Scott Carey | 10m |
Data from LeadDev's 2024 report surveys 1,100 engineering leaders and finds headlines flatten into specifics: Q1 2023 sees 170,000 people laid off, 70% of… | ||
| Dates and deadlines...it's complicated | Sara Hicks | 12m |
Claims the common feature road map is a lie based on a failed migration where two chosen sites miss their launch and the customer renews their contract… | ||
| The scrappy/scale mindset | Melissa DePuydt | 25m |
Claims a two‑mode leadership framework called Scrappy/Scale Mindset developed while building teams at The Washington Post and The Atlantic and reports it works… | ||
| You don't understand how trust works | Francis Sirizotti | 11m |
Argues that trust comes from the intersection of predictability, safety, self-determination and not from transactional gestures, and offers concrete practices… | ||
| Crossing the enterprise chasm | Michael Grinich | 26m |
Companies often start PLG — then scale to enterprise (examples: Slack Dropbox Asana Airtable) but crossing the Enterprise Chasm requires multi‑year… | ||
| Optimizing the developer experience through collaboration | Alex Barnett | 28m |
Claims that API collaboration is a necessity not a nice-to-have, backed by numbers: 35 million developers on Postman, 98% of the Fortune 500, and 61% of orgs… | ||
| Spin it up, shut it down | Alicia Collymore, Martha Lambert | 26m |
Build a greenfield Status Pages product, spin a small redistributed engineering team, ship an MVP in months and reach 40 customers; choose a fresh team to get… | ||
| Using clinical science to effectively tackle code review anxiety | Carol Lee | 21m |
Research produces a concrete intervention: a single-session cognitive behavioral workshop over Zoom tested in a randomized control trial with 59 developers who… | ||
| Ethics in the age of AI | Christina Entcheva | 21m |
Claims that technology is neutral are challenged with specifics: PredPol’s predictions score about 0.4% accuracy overall and as low as 0.1% for burglary… | ||
| Empowering developers to accelerate decentralized app development | Charles Garrett | 20m |
Builds a next‑gen on‑chain rendering engine called React-on-Chain, iterates March–Dec 2023 with a team that grows from 1 to 3, and abandons a risky… | ||
| Making better build vs buy decisions | Chris Bell | 11m |
A concrete decision framework names the tradeoffs and measures them: differentiation, security and compliance, cost and margin, reliability and scalability… | ||
| Are we doing this right? | P.A. Masse, Scott Carey | 07m |
LeadDev and Harness publish a 500‑respondent survey that claims 90% use experimentation while 10% do nothing, with a top 1% at full maturity and about 35% ad… | ||
| nothing matches | ||