LeadDev Berlin is a developer conference in Berlin. Meri, one of the hosts, jokingly described it as ā€œA leadership conference disguised as a developer conferenceā€, so the focus is more on leading in the tech sector than on tech itself.

Day 1

The 3 main thoughts that stuck with me throughout the day:

  • Technical leadership is more about being a leader than it is about tech
  • The tech sector is not in a great place right now
  • There’s a negative sentiment around AI

šŸœ Leading through scarcity: Building capacity in the team you have

By Irina Stanescu

  • Tech Sector is a pressure cooker
  • Mindset in tech sector turned into ā€œdo more with lessā€
  • Building or creating capacity is the solution
    • Reinvest the capacity in efforts that build even more capacity

3 aspects to building capacity:

  • Technology
    • Better observability is a way of building capacity with technology. Incidents and bugs take less time to resolve.
    • Reducing Tech Debt to speed up new development
  • Process
    • Ruthless prioritisation
    • Say ā€œnoā€ faster
  • People
    • Anxiety is the elephant in the room
    • Ourselves
      • Seek support
      • Circle of Control/Influence/Concern
        • Comes from 7 habits of highly effective people
        • Focus on Influence/Control
        • Know where to focus
    • Leaders
      • Setting expectations reduces upward anxiety
    • Reports
      • Be careful of Mood Contagion
      • Go from Directing to Enabling
      • Teach self-management to the team (this goes further than technical skills)
      • Teach people to manage up
      • Your role as a leader is to reduce anxiety in the team
        • Be vulnerable, but be careful how (refers back to Mood Contagion)

ā“ Estimates as probabilities

By Luis Martin-Santos

  • When will something be done? This assumes going from 0% to 100% completion.

    • This may be the wrong question to ask.
    • Gradual completion
    • Order of magnitude and assign probability to each order (days/weeks/months/years)
  • If the order of magnitude is years, the chunks are too big and you need refinement and gradual release

šŸ—£ What we talk about when we talk about leadership

By Lena Reinhard

  • How to lead when expectations don’t align with values?
  • Innovation ⇒ true innovation for 1 or 2 players, herd mentality for the rest
    • Hypes, it’s in reality PR and Marketing
  • Hype, but at what cost? For example, AI and CO2 production
  • ā€œWhen it’s leadership, it’s not called carelessnessā€
    • There’s always a new business buzzword, but we have to be careful what those words mean in reality
  • High growth and quick returns → lead to → Unliveable situations for humans

Overall a no-nonsense and thought-provoking talk about the tech industry. Way more good points were made in the presentation.

šŸŽ² How games brought our Engineering Principles to life

By Christoph Neijenhuis

  • Don’t bite off more than you can chew
    • Can you carry the maintenance cost of the shiny new feature?
  • It’s normal to need repetition before an idea sticks

šŸ—ƒ Why you’re doing service catalogs wrong

By Lisa Karlin Curtis

  • Focus on the problem, not the solution
  • Sometimes you can get value from a very different MVP than the final solution
    • The final solution might be Service Catalogs, but if you have a hammer you look for a nail
  • Anything that isn’t used will rot (applied to data in this case)
    • Simply displaying data on a webpage isn’t using it!
    • Someone being paged as a result of wrong data will be fixed very quickly
  • Don’t have a Service Catalog on the roadmap
    • Have the problem on the roadmap that coincidentally has a Service Catalog as the solution
    • Focus on the business problem
  • Build incrementally
  • Focus on a small group of people who love you at the start

🦸 Level up the whole party, not just the hero

By Denise Yu

  • Novices see what is there, experts see what is not there
  • Proximal Development Theory
  • Understand motivating forces
  • Distribute expertise over the team

šŸ”“ What your browser can teach you about software security

By Mark Goodwin

  • Align incentives
    • No Tech Debt is not inherently valuable

šŸ› Technical diplomacy

By Ross McFarlane

  • It’s easy to get lost in cynicism when it comes to other people
  • The behaviour of the other person is often (wrongly) attributed to flaws in their personality
    • We are kinder to ourselves than to other people
  • Social capital
  • Having code doesn’t win arguments, having code just enables challenging assumptions
  • Not everyone reaches the same conclusion given a premise and a story, even if it seems obvious to you
  • Facilitation > Intervention
  • Mindset about work: ā€œWe’re just trying to get our job doneā€
    • Don’t fight
  • Ending quote: ā€œBe kindā€

šŸ“ˆ Effective communication: Mastering growth-oriented feedback

By Erica Chesley

  • Ask reports what they want feedback on
  • Things ā€˜stick’ better if the recipient actively engages with it
  • Talk with people about how they feel about something