The Lead Developer London 2018

Videos will most likely be found sooner or later on White October Events Youtube.

The conference was inspiring and brought up a few tricks here and there. Mostly talks about leadership with a few more or less relevant technical talks sprinkled in. A good reminder on all the techniques and perspectives that I have heard before but not structured as neatly and condensed.

The Lead Developer London 2018, Day 1

The Container Operator’s Manual

Alice Goldfuss

• Don't underestimate the effort to get good tooling around containers
• On-call needs minimum 4 people

First Steps as a Lead

Dan Persa

• Don't repeat yourself is the opposite of a good rule with people

It's personal - the art of giving and receiving code reviews gracefully

Alexandra Hill

• Automate away typos, whitespace etc
• Use techniques to make comments more soft and approachable
• Quandrants are awesome, use quandrants!

Knowing Me, Knowing You - Growing teams to continuously deliver

Pia Nilsson

• Proccess like WIP limit leads to stress, counter act with psychological safety to balance
• Re-check slides for ideas

How I learned to stop worrying and love meetings

Menno van Slooten

• Could be good to go all in and leave programming for a while
• Don't forget your power to make change happen!
• Feedback loop as a manager is naturally a bit longer than for example TDD programming

Building sustainable teams to handle uncertainty

Jenny Duckett

• A bit dry but extremely good info, re-read slides?
• You have to put trust in the team, nurture the team, and deliveries will follow.
• Don't underestimate silly things like "the cookie quadrant"
• Explain the overall single focus for the team

The Hardest Scaling Challenge of All - Yourself

Christian McCarrick

• Don't agree with estimates, Parkinson's law being true as a fact
• Block your calendar and don't hide the reason if you feel like it could lead to being a role model (health etc.)
• Schedule email time
• Manager Readme could be a good thing to set expectations even though it feels a little bit impersonal

Introduction to ReasonML

Jack Lewin

• Interesting with 100% coverage
• Not a superset of javascript?

CI/CD For Humans: Empathy as the Foundation for Effective Deployments

Jackie Balzer

• Good ideas, didn't consider UX for CI/CD but it is definately a factor of success

Junior.next()

Tara Ojo

• Not super relevant
• Tell junior to keep a running record of learnings and competence to improve recruitment efforts

Points don’t mean prizes

Adrian Howard

• Readling list: User Story Mapping
• I completely agree, have been using this for years!
• No estimates has some arguments to get from this, don't estimate, instead break down and focus on value

Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?

Nickolas Means

• "Human Error" is not useful and can be explained by a bad system.
• Retrospective prime directive is really powerful
• Always look for "story 2", can probably reduce frustrations!

The Lead Developer London 2018, Day 2

Go Slow To Go Fast: Building Strong Foundations for Leadership

Alicia Liu

• If you think you might be burning out, you probably already are.
• Watch out for the bad spiral of no exercise
• Form then speed, changing will most likely make you slower short term.

Legacy code: Big Rewrite or Progressive Rejuvenation?

Uberto Barbini

• Legacy system complexity is always underestimated because of success bias
• You have to rediscover knowledge for the rewrite
• Look up Bjarne Stroustrup
• Kintsugi is really interesting, fixing pottery with gold
• Code quality is just about cost of change, everything else is tooling
• You have to simplify on boarding for your legacy systems
• GitHub uberto/alchemical

Build a Better Hiring Process with Design Thinking

Crystal Yan

• Is a new hire really comfortable enough to give honest feedback?
• Could be useful but need real story/example, a bit too abstract to me. Came later!
• Bottom line: Seek feedback and try to improve the whole chain, not just part of it.

Functional programming for everyone

Marek Rogala

• Immutability is awesome!
• Declarative code is not necessarily easier to understand, you need to work on clean code
• Will give new perspectives better than a new framework

Teaching New Tricks – How to enhance the skills of experienced developers

Clare Sudbery

• Good speaker!
• Own your failures!
• When confused: ask questions in a way where you are unapolagetic and curious
• Workshops can be useful even if they are not perfect
• Don’t overload the team, emotional exhaustion
• If learning faster, ask that person to explain it to other person
• Thirst for knowledge > knowledge!

Tips for managing a widely distributed team

Dirkjan Bussink

• Paints a rosy picture of remote teams
• Completely distrubuted teams means everyone is in the same situation, which can help
• Should we try meetings where everyone connects to zoom, to make it equal with mathieu and yaovi?
• Try to avoid DM, so people can join in
• Note to self: Read psychological safety!
• Kick off together regularly, do not do day to day work
• Communication lead times sound horrible
• WIP sounds horrible
• Missing: How to plan and divide work

How to run awesome tech internships!

Beverley Newing

• Textio.com is a tool for writing more inclusive (and successful?) job descriptions

Strategies to Edit Production Data

Julie Qiu

• Good stuff if you need this.
• How about leveraging fluentmigrator?

Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers

Melinda Seckington

• Values, future, current skills, current role quadrant really interesting

How to Survive the Single Page App-ocalypse

Jim Newbery

• Don’t really agree with this presentation
• Ranting and anecdotal

Using Agile Techniques to Build a More Inclusive Team

Kevin Goldsmith Slides

• Awesome stuff!
• 1 on 1 personal working agreement using post its of two colors that both get
• Revisit working agreement every 6 months or every year
• Expectations on the responsibilties of a future role that the person aims for
• If the person wants your role: Start moving responsibilities to the person in a deliberate gradual way
• Presentation assumes and likes hierachy of many levels?
• “I own, I consult, you inform, you own”
• Walk for one on one
• Toys in one on one to defuse pressure
• Use uncomfortable silence
• Polling vs voting, with polling decisions are based on opinions but not adirect result of voting. Might not work perfectly in Sweden, better with team - ownership?
• If you vote you need to support and defend decision
• Fist of five polling, roman voting for voting
• Always have meeting agendas and goals, maybe shared doc
• Lean coffee is an alternative to pre-planned agenda
• Learn to step back
• Decisions or just talking? Book club is a nice example!
• Use observer role in meeting to point out interruptions and other collaboration killers.
• Rotate roles!