The Lead Developer London 2019
2019-06-11..2019-06-12
London, United Kingdom
[The Lead Developer London 2015, The Lead Developer New York 2017, The Lead Developer New York 2018, The Lead Developer London 2018, The Lead Developer Austin 2018, The Lead Developer New York 2019, The Lead Developer London 2019]
who it's for
engineering managers, tech leads, people managers, senior engineers, hiring managers, platform and operations engineers
topics
team charters and retros; feedback equation practice; team-level OKRs and goals; agent-based AI software; TensorFlow.js and MobileNet; anonymous recruitment systems; volunteer on-call rotation; feature-flagging for risk mitigation; building security culture on infrastructure; front-end architecture navigation; technical hiring process inclusivity
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Navigating team friction | Lara Hogan | 30m |
Argues that team friction comes from predictable brain responses and names a concrete mechanism: six core needs (BICEPS) that trigger amygdala hijacks. Gives… | ||
| AI-powered JavaScript applications | Asim Hussain | 11m |
Demos show runnable things and exact tools: an emoji-overlay app called TheMojifier that uses a face API to return faces plus emotions (anger contempt disgust… | ||
| Engage teams to achieve high performance | José Caldeira | 11m |
Five concrete practices decide whether a team accelerates: set bold measurable goals (OKRs/KPIs) that are simple and binary, use constraints as mandatory… | ||
| Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team | Whitney O'Banner | 13m |
Advocates ditching individual OKRs in favour of team-level skip individual OKRs and tracking work as tasks, noting individual OKRs become tasks and… | ||
| What on earth does it mean to build AI software? | Ronald Ashri | 29m |
Defines building AI software as delegating decision-making to machines, shows a concrete agent-based framework (passive U1, active/proactive U2, autonomous… | ||
| Guiding self-organising teams | Rebecca Hill | 11m |
Builds a new engineering group from scratch called Team Cosmos and documents what actually works and what fails the first six months, including a string of… | ||
| The power of positive transformation | Heidi Waterhouse | 34m |
Argues that positive behavioural shaping — using immediate, chosen rewards like clicker and treats — produces repeatable change, with examples: a dog trained… | ||
| The reality of testing in an artificial world | Angie Jones | 27m |
An ad recommendation system uses machine learning to choose which creative to show via an ad recommendation API, trained by feedback from customers. Testing… | ||
| A team in ten minutes | Steve Williams | 12m |
Claim: organisations can compress team formation into minutes by rehearsing diverse crisis crews. RNLI runs weekly exercises with ~40 volunteers, picking six… | ||
| Frameworks for developing developers | Melinda Seckington | 37m |
Asserts ten game-design lessons and shows what’s actually put in place: a staged onboarding with an onboarding template board in Trello, mentor pairing, a… | ||
| Hiring diverse teams with an anonymous recruitment process | Bethan Vincent | 11m |
A company builds a fully-anonymous recruitment system on Ruby on Rails: applicants submit a mobile number, a cover letter, five skills they have and five they… | ||
| Fixing out-of-hours on-call | Brian Scanlan | 30m |
Intercom creates a volunteer virtual on‑call team of about six to eight people rotating ~six months, moves alarms into a Terraform + GitHub flow pipeline with… | ||
| Give 10%, get 110% | Kate Beard | 11m |
At the Financial Times granting 10% time produces concrete results not vague inspiration: two junior squads pair up and build and ship an internal tool from… | ||
| Eiffel's Tower | Nickolas Means | 38m |
A concrete-and-iron project delivered in 22 months, the tower rises to 300 metres (1,063 ft) on four 6½‑foot concrete slabs, two legs anchored by piles driven… | ||
| Flavours of technical leadership | Patrick Kua | 31m |
A clear, specific shortlist: the talk claims technical leadership is act not title and proposes the Trident model of three career tracks (individual… | ||
| Inclusion starts with an I | Dora Militaru | 15m |
Conference data shows 45% senior female at one company while UK pay gaps still favour men; network analysis finds 22% more same-gender ties reducing women's… | ||
| Business as usual: how to stop drowning and learn to swim | Jonathan Stott | 28m |
Shows that BAU consumes 20–100% of team time, once blocking a project for 12 months, and that the team released a new online publication platform a year after… | ||
| Behind the scenes of an effective & inclusive hiring process | Ola Sitarska | 26m |
Verve grows from 10 to 35 engineers in 18 months while hitting diversity targets of 33% women, 9% people of color by switching to evidence-based hiring… | ||
| Mobile development in 2019: native versus cross-platform | Miriam Busch | 11m |
Compares four concrete stacks — ReactNative, Xamarin, Flutter and Kotlin multi-platform — and gives the tradeoffs: shared UI and JS bridge cause performance… | ||
| Building security culture on infrastructure teams | Franklin Hu | 20m |
Concrete practices and outcomes: a three-part framework — learning and growth, empathy, responsibility — plus concrete practices like rotations and security… | ||
| Why we should be scared of Shor's Algorithm right now | James Birnie | 11m |
Quantum factorisation moves from theoretical to practical: Shor’s algorithm is implemented on a quantum simulator and has been used on real quantum computers… | ||
| Navigating front-end architecture like a Neopian | Julia Nguyen | 39m |
Evaluations at Indiegogo lead to a production SSR that mimics NextJS, with CDN caching and a cached JS refreshed by hit-based algorithm to avoid stale pages; a… | ||
| The key to solving the conundrum of software estimation | Jonathan Rigby | 11m |
A concrete claim: trust trumps tooling — when estimates go wrong the visible cause is often a broken relationship, not the lack of story points or Monte Carlo… | ||
| Silence isn't golden, it's deadly! | Paula Kennedy | 24m |
A company survey finds a third of a 20‑person remote Pivotal Cloud Foundry Solutions team does not feel part of a team. Experiments include one-to-ones every… | ||
| Leading the team through a rapid growth | Joanna Chwastowska | 24m |
A mobile app that analyses blood samples and alerts clinicians to acute kidney injury is live in two London hospitals, with a year-long clinical evaluation… | ||
| Facilitation techniques 202 | Neha Batra | 16m |
Agenda-as-inclusive-tool: timelines with explicit breaks, visible check-off for transitions, and a count of seats to prevent squeeze. Pack a facilitation… | ||
| How to live outside the clock | Sal Freudenberg, Clare Sudbery | 32m |
An all‑female team builds a time machine at Hack Manchester (57 teams, 25‑hour event) and wins Best in Show by wiring a puck.js trigger to an app that offers… | ||
| Welcome our from our Premier Sponsor | John Wards | 02m |
The Economist announces sponsorship to build The Economist's reputation as an engineering option, reports a 12‑month program to shift from outsourced to… | ||
| nothing matches | ||