A few weeks ago I attended LeadDev Berlin – an event for leaders in the tech industry. It’s the first similar event I’ve attended and I enjoyed the talks and the workshops. Here are a few highlights that I think are worth mentioning:
Luis Martin-Santos from Cabify gave a great talk about “Estimates as probabilities”, illustrated with a nice comic story that was handed to the attendees. The idea of giving the estimate a value of how sure we are this estimate will be met, is definitely useful in many projects where the estimates are hard or impossible to make.
Another interesting talk was “Level up the whole party, not just the hero” by Denise Yu, where she described how by helping everyone in the team improve their skills, we move forward a way faster. She mentioned some key tools for the team and personal leveling up – a proper career matrix, employee skill survey and gap analysis, and of course a good professional development plan. She also mentioned an interesting resource for the career matrix, which many organisations struggle with – https://progression.fyi/ where you can find resources from lead companies in many sectors. There is always a room for improvement and following these steps, we can give our teams better visualisation of the next steps in their knowledge and career development.
My absolutely favourite talk was “Ice, confusion, and the 38,000ft crash” by Nickolas Means. As much as I like technical talks, the ones that are related to a real life story are always more engaging and this one was definitely a great one, as horrifying the story was. In a very short summary Nickolas described how a plane crash was caused by relying too much on automation. With the AI tools taking so much attention lately, we start relying on them more and more. There is a valid concern that at some point this will lead to developers that mostly write AI prompts, but don’t understand the errors and misunderstandings that it can lead to. Have you had a case when an AI coding tool understood you completely wrong? Guess we all had. Imagine what will happen if we didn’t know what to look for and how to correct it. In conclusion it’s a great tool, but still a tool, that needs a human brain to work it out.
Except the talks, LeadDev had several interesting activities, workshops, AMA sessions and table talks. I enjoyed a lot the CircleCI workshop “Learning from failure: How to adapt your leadership style to lead effectively through uncertainty”. Initially I thought that 80 minutes is a bit too much, but it was so engaging that felt short. We did groups by 4 discussing different problems like implementing engineering manager role in teams, working with various teams at the same time and leading a change in an organisation. Definitely a great experience.
And last but not least, I have to mention the AMA sessions – these were really interesting! I attended the ones on topic of engineering managers, principal engineers and staff engineers and they were all engaging and fun. It was very helpful to hear how different companies approach these roles and learn more about the experience the speakers had at their career path.
So that’s a wrap! While this was my first LeadDev, it definitely won’t be the last and I hope to learn more about leadership progression next year!