The Lead Developer 2016
2016-06-23..2016-06-24
London, United Kingdom
who it's for
engineering managers, tech leads, senior software engineers, site reliability engineers, recruiting managers, quality assurance engineers, frontend developers
topics
monolith to microservices; Pact contract testing; Spring Cloud / Netflix OSS; feature flags and automation; press release product spec; blameless learning reviews; structured referral auditing; deploys from chat bots; Rust borrow checker; CSS Modules; webhooks
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Highlights | The Lead Developer UK | 01m |
A brisk montage of conference clips that makes one claim: culture and continuous learning matter more than specific tools. Footage emphasizes building… | ||
| Rebooting Culture | Camille Fournier | 36m |
Runs a postmortem on a three‑year culture rebuild at Rent the Runway where an engineering org of ~15–20 devs hits a cultural segfault and recovers while later… | ||
| Networks and hiring in tech | Yasmina Banaszczuk | 29m |
Research from a PhD on networks and career entry finds that hiring via personal contacts speeds hires but systematically favors people from privileged… | ||
| Tour of language landscape | Yan Cui | 32m |
A whirlwind tour of five languages shows concrete wins not platitudes: S3 type provider generates types on the fly so missing S3 objects fail compile rather… | ||
| Working backwards from the customer | Thomas Lobinger | 26m |
Describes a concrete process used at Amazon: write a mock press release as a one‑page spec with heading, summary, problem, solution, leadership quote, customer… | ||
| Building new on top of old: the argument for simplicity | Sam Lambert | 31m |
GitHub runs a Ruby on Rails monolith backed by MySQL and serves over 11M users while favoring proven tools over novelty. Deploys happen from chat hundreds of… | ||
| Hacking verbal communication systems | Ryan Alexander | 16m |
Argues that explicit hand signals borrowed from Occupy and Quaker meetings replace invisible turn-taking and cut latency and interruption races, using eight… | ||
| Overhead, not downtrodden | Penny Wyatt | 11m |
Reframes overhead roles as levers not excuses: a QA team becomes a quality assistance team that trains developers, builds customer empathy and enforces… | ||
| How to crash an airplane | Nickolas Means | 43m |
July 19, 1989 United Airlines Flight 232 suffers a tail-engine fan disc failure that rips out hydraulic lines so the DC-10 loses all hydraulics and… | ||
| Leading Leads - Lessons from a growing team | Monika Piotrowicz | 29m |
Team growth requires concrete moves: prepare new leads well before the need, document a list of responsibilities so expectations and evaluation are clear, and… | ||
| The journey from monolith to microservices | Mike Gehard | 28m |
A concrete migration path presents: start with API-level tests and Pact contract testing, reorganize into well-structured monolith modules (use-case objects… | ||
| Leadership. By the numbers. | Michael Lopp | 43m |
Gives concrete rules and surprising numbers: schedule 30 minutes every week for one-on-ones, keep team size near 7 plus or minus 3, expect conformity effects… | ||
| How to succeed at hiring without really trying | Melinda Seckington | 23m |
Argues for employee evangelism: turn the whole product team into storytellers by building a library, a progression path, pairing on posts, and regular… | ||
| The wonderful world of webhooks | Lorna Jane Mitchell | 10m |
States that webhooks are pubsub over HTTP, not polling, so servers push events and clients just reply 200; GitHub webhooks include a verbose JSON payload (the… | ||
| Dealing with culture divide and internal advocacy | Laura Czajkowski | 16m |
Distributed teams get fewer assumptions and more overhead so adopt concrete practices: use the Chrome app figure it out to pick windows that minimize unfair… | ||
| Writing Modular CSS with CSS modules | Katie Fenn | 09m |
Claims that CSS Modules makes styles local by default and appends a unique hash to class names so rules cannot clobber each other, demonstrates with a small… | ||
| Telling stories through your commits | Joel Chippindale | 09m |
Argues that version history can be the primary documentation and gives three concrete practices: make atomic commits so a WordPress 4.0.1 update isn’t a single… | ||
| How not to burn out your monitoring team | Gil Zellner | 12m |
Argues concrete fixes: mandatory half-day off after a sleepless production incident, weekly duck time to fix small nagging issues, and wider rotation or follow… | ||
| The seven righteous fights | Heidi Waterhouse | 30m |
Seven concrete engineering habits: hire a localization expert for a week and never hard‑code UI strings; plan for encryption, SSL between services, data… | ||
| Getting an engineering team to eat their vegetables | Duretti Hirpa | 21m |
Slack reports about 3 million daily active users, roughly 930 paying customers and ~500 employees, and coordination workload rises ~50% over 20 years per… | ||
| What I wish I knew as a first time Tech Lead | Patrick Kua | 30m |
Transitioning into a tech lead is messy and specific: impact becomes amplified so mistakes affect whole teams, not just code; coding as a refuge undermines… | ||
| How to make a sandwich | Daniel Terhorst-North | 33m |
Argues the sandwich model is misunderstood and usually doesn’t work, frames feedback as a systems problem using Systems Theory and timing to show small… | ||
| Addressing Imposter Syndrome | Crystal Huff | 35m |
Defines impostor syndrome as trouble internalizing accomplishments and gives concrete countermeasures: a quick exercise to text a friend for three strengths… | ||
| nothing matches | ||