LeadDev Berlin is a developer conference in Berlin. Meri, one of the hosts, jokingly described it as “A leadership conference disguised as a developer conference”, 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
🏜 Leading through scarcity: Building capacity in the team you have
- Tech Sector is a pressure cooker
- Mindset in tech sector turned into “do more with less”
- 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 “no” 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)
❓ Estimates as probabilities
-
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
🗣 What we talk about when we talk about leadership
- 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
- “When it’s leadership, it’s not called carelessness”
- 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.
🎲 How games brought our Engineering Principles to life
- 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
🗃 Why you’re doing service catalogs wrong
- 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
🔓 What your browser can teach you about software security
By Mark Goodwin
- Align incentives
- No Tech Debt is not inherently valuable
🏛 Technical diplomacy
- 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: “We’re just trying to get our job done”
- Don’t fight
- Ending quote: “Be kind”
📈 Effective communication: Mastering growth-oriented feedback
- Ask reports what they want feedback on
- Things ‘stick’ better if the recipient actively engages with it
- Talk with people about how they feel about something