You've done your job. You've delivered timely features. You even optimised some processes along the way. Yet you still get turned down for a promotion or a raise.

Anyone who worked in tech, for any amount of time, knows that the landscape is in constant motion. The technologies of today are obsolete tomorrow. The tools of the trade are in constant motion, and continuous upskilling is the bread and butter of all software engineers who survive the passing waves. The software engineers of the future are those who mastered 1 skill: adaptation.

We all have our very own wellbeing processor.It influences how you feel and act. It leads to every outcome you’ve ever had or will have…For most of us, our wellbeing processor is primarily fed by our very own AI.Unfortunately, our AI often seems to work against us.In this talk, you’ll learn how to take back control and train your AI to work with you to promotes a growth mindset and optimise wellbeing.

Building a business is a slugfest to see who gets more customers first. You have to adopt that mindset when writing code. As an old boss told me once: Clean code won't matter if we're dead. You have to shift your mindset from best practices to getting shit done.

The role of a Tech Lead is more about leading than tech. Tech is a part of it, but people are the rest. In my talk, "Tech Leadership is more about people than tech" I'll explain why people skills are crucial in tech leadership. We'll dive into the essential skills every tech leader needs: listening, empathy, and effective feedback.But more than just knowing these skills, you'll learn how to develop them.

“Hell is other people.” There are many talks on how to get started as an engineer and how to step into management, but there are few talks about how to be an adult in (professional) relationships. I’ve spent my career in small companies and startups, FAANG organizations, and opensource communities. Each of these spaces demands different things of the people in them, yet across these spaces all succeed and fail along the fault lines of a core set of soft skills: regulating emotions, setting boundaries, framing experiences productively, and letting go. In this talk, I share everything I’ve learned in my career that has helped my colleagues, mentees, and friends so that you may navigate the most difficult part of tech—people—with grace, empathy, and safety.

The experience of being a Tech Lead can change from organisation to organisation, from being an ivory tower architect to getting stuck in the weeds with complex technical challenges. A Lean Software Company is one whose approach is deeply rooted in optimising customer value through studying the techniques used in Toyota’s Production System.Old-school Agile also has many roots in Lean principles - Kanban, for example, is a tool used on the Toyota production line. But what can the manufacturing of cars teach us about software development?Join me for this exploration through the world of a TL as experienced within a Lean Software Company as I reveal some of the secrets that allow these companies to deliver higher-quality software at speed.

Probably the most noticeable change engineers experience when they become leaders is the increase of day-to-day chaos. The moment you become responsible for the work of a team or a large area, tasks start coming at you. Dozens of them! Sometimes, per day.

Vanessa’s presentation, Refactoring Mindsets: Prioritizing Mental Health in Software Development, will delve into the signs and symptoms commonly experienced within this professional group. The session will identify and define a range of mental disorders, offering a clearer understanding of these conditions. Furthermore, we will explore various coping strategies, equipping Developers & Engineers with the tools to manage their mental health more effectively. This presentation aims to foster a deeper awareness and provide practical solutions to support mental well-being in the Tech Industry.

This session explores the art of interviewing beyond traditional assessments, focusing on cultivating soft skills, mentorship, and recognizing senior talent. Covering strategies to build rapport, assess soft skills effectively, and shift the interview dynamic towards mentorship, the talk emphasizes the importance of cultivating a supportive environment for candidates. Additionally, it delves into identifying seniority traits beyond technical expertise, promoting diversity, and continuous improvement through feedback. Participants will gain insights to transform interviews into meaningful engagements that find talent and potential future leaders.

Whether you’ve switched roles from IC to EM of your current team, are starting from a different team or brand new to the company, you have to get to know your team as their manager. We’ll look into some of the best ways to learn about your team, some blind spots to be aware of, and ways to help grow trust.

After years of rapid growth, the winds have changed in many tech companies, with strategy changes, budget cuts, restructurings, and layoffs. Productivity and efficiency have become the business buzzwords of the season, and while pressure towards “more engineering productivity” is mounting in many organizations, it can be difficult to apply these abstract concepts to engineering teams and turn them into concrete actions that don’t alienate your team and lead to lasting impact that aligns with your stakeholders’ needs. I’m here to help. In this talk, we’ll go: - Beyond buzzwords: What do productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness mean?

You're working as a developer, and one day - BAM, you're offered the chance to lead a team, to step into a managerial or leadership position.What now? If I accept the offer, will I forget how to code? Will my skills depreciate? Is there a way back to a specialist path?

The time has come: the DevOps revolution is winding down, and we’re entering the post-DevOps era. We’re at the precipice of a massive generational shift in how we build and understand our software, and CTOs need to prepare.In the past, we were only interested in basic metrics on how we operated our software: reliability, uptime, MTTR, MTTD. Observability 1.0. Companies that settle for these basic data points will not survive in this new era.As engineering best practices around separating deploys from releases, testing in production, observability-driven development have become standardized, the approach to telemetry has stalled, and it’s time for a new version: Observability 2.0.Learn what this new version means for your engineers, and how to embrace this breaking change to:- Save them from drowning in symptom-based alerting- Help fewer people work together to build better software- Create fast feedback loops throughout the entire organization through highly granular visibility into all their systems

No developer is an island and no developer is perfect. This means that you cannot create anything without using components written by someone else and these components will have defects or missing features. At some point in our life we all asked for support to someone else.But being a maintainer is not an easy task at all. Think about receiving tons of reports with partial or missing information, or being yelled by strangers for not being responsive or fast enough.For the health of our industry we must love our maintainers more: in this talk I’ll show how to politely ask for help and how to make sure you provide all the necessary informations.

There's lots of information out there about reducing cognitive load for users, but what about developers? This talk will cover Cognitive Load Theory, how some disabilities affect it, and designing a development environment around it.

Learn how to create and share professional web development content to expand your reach, advance your careers and establish expert status. This talk will tech you how to share your knowledge effectively through blogs, videos, and social media posts, helping you stand out and connect with others.

The economy is terrible, layoffs are everywhere, and interviewing is hard. Job searching is exhausting and stressful, so how do you overcome all of that? All you need is a plan!Whether it’s overcoming nerves or learning to communicate your technical experience more effectively, we all have our struggles. What you can’t do is let them hold you back!