Your work as a manager is much less tangible, more long-term wins over short-term gains. In this 10-minute crash course, you’ll learn how to set goals as a leader and follow up on them to ensure your career is progressing as much as you’re helping others progress.

A good "manager README" can serve as a jumping point for people to understand your values; a bad README might look like it would fit in better on a MySpace profile. A good runbook helps you go back to sleep within minutes; a bad runbook will tell you the tale of its people while everything is burning down around you. The common thread among these examples is that bad writing makes the mistake of centering the writer's experience over that of the reader.

In this talk, I'll describe a framework for beginning from your own motivation for writing at work, deciding on the most important message, and specific ways your writing can fail in spite of your efforts. We'll evaluate examples of writing while asking ourselves if the writing puts the reader first. We'll come away with some specific tools for writing at work (including template questions to ask yourself when writing announcements, meeting notes, READMEs, and weekly snippets) and all of our writing from now on will be a joy for our coworkers to read.

I will share my experience as someone with dyslexia in tech and what I have learned as an expert coach for people with neurodiversity.

Some people's brains work differently, in this talk, you will learn how to harness differences within your team so that everyone can do their best work. You will learn:

• what dyslexia, ADHD and autism are and how they can be advantages in tech
• what support you should offer to enable everyone to do their best
• which types of tasks will allow different people to shine
• what this means for recruitment

Green apps don't take longer to write than Grey apps; they don't perform worse than Grey apps; they simply require some planning and discipline in execution.

In this talk, I'll explain what it means for an application to be Green. I'll also present the 12 Factor Green App Methodology, a clear, concise plan for building Green applications.

You'll walk away tooled up and ready to build a lean Green application you can be proud of.

In this talk I'll walk you through my story to teach you some thinking and rules for remaining a principled, kind, and transparent manager while you perform one of the hardest (and least discussed!) tasks you can perform. I learned these skills the hard way, getting it wrong time and time again as I scaled the technology function at Pollen.

We'll talk about dignity, respect, kindness, the "blast radius" of a bad exit, and how to never surprise anyone.

For as long as humans have been counting and quantifying each other, individuals with access to data collection have encountered circumstances that raise a not-so-simple question: "Do I follow my conscience, or follow the money?" History shows that some answer it with sacrifice, some choose to engage in subversion from within, some are paralyzed by indecision. A few look away instead.

"Where's my line?" is the guiding question, and it's challenging. In this session, we'll connect dots between the past and our roles in tech today, and look at myriad ways to identify where your own line is drawn. You'll come away prepared to start engaging with the hard questions while drawing inspiration from the courage and quandaries of those who've come before us.

The good news is that we have made great strides in some areas of explainable AI. The bad news is that creating explainable AI is not easy and simple as related in medium articles. In this talk, I defend that we should separate explanations from the model (i.e. being model agnostic) because true model interpretability will cost performance and accuracy.

In this talk, we'll apply linguistics research to the asynchronous workplace, and we'll build a set of actionable insights to help distributed teams thrive. For example, we'll discuss:

• What we can learn about a team's health from their Slack archives
• How to leverage existing linguistic tools to create spaces that foster diversity
• Three overlooked roles of emojis in team communication
• How punctuation can cause unintended conflict between senior and junior team members
• Commonly used "violent metaphors" in technology that make discussions less inclusive
• The best techniques for over-communicating productively
• How to give better feedback from across the country (instead of from across the room)

This talk will dive into the obstacles facing digital workers, and explore the tools that enable us to strengthen communication on distributed teams.

This talk will cover tools and techniques such as:

• Creating an Internal Tech Radar: an artefact for discovering emergent technologies and practices adoption
• Decision Records: Tools for articulating, documenting and validating decisions across Product and Technology
• Internal and External Marketing: Creating roadmaps that are influential in all directions of the business (up, down, and sideways across your peer group)
• Knowing when to adopt New or Upgraded Tech: Utilising a simple Cost vs Benefit assessment framework
• Understanding performance: Key Metrics to track to understand your teams' and organisation’s health to move quickly with confidence

I will draw on real-world case studies to underline how these tools created internal strategic alignment and direction that resulted in setting these companies apart as leaders in technology and product innovation.

However, these communities take a lot of effort to get right, are difficult to establish, and even harder to maintain momentum, especially cross-discipline. In this talk, we cover our journey with communities; the different types of problems we’ve tackled, models of engagement, successes and learnings; with practical tips on how to: - identify the right business challenges for a community - get the right engagement and set your communities up to succeed - measure success and communicate progress to nervous stakeholders Finally we’ll talk about what we’re doing next - tackling cross-site and remote challenges, and exploring communities outside of the BBC.

Outside the workplace, these labels are of minimal usefulness. We often attempt (and fail) to understand the nature and capabilities of a coder according to assumed understandings associated with these labels. Ultimately, this collapses under the weight of these assumptions. We really must be privy to the culture of the organization where they emerged to fully grasp their meaning.

As Leads, we are responsible for the construction of a working team and the development of its members. To be effective, we need to establish an understanding of each member's level of development and their potential future. Since we cannot rely on the titles that they have been given throughout their career, we need something else. This talk explores fictionalizations drawn from film noir, stage magic and monasticism to trace a coder's path over time. It provides a complete language of metaphorical archetypes to help us describe a coder and their potential.

We’ve treated our distributed nature as a boon to how we work, not just a problem to be dealt with. The practical results are pretty clear - working distributed is not a brake on business success but a strong amplifier.

In this talk, we will examine some of the ideas we take for granted, such as the myth that only natural talent can make a developer great at what they do. As someone who has worked as an educator as well as a developer, I aim to address some of the thinking that can hold us back in making the most of our talent and that of our teams and to provide insight into the ways we can make our teams more engaged, more productive and ultimately, happier.

We'll take a look at the research behind what motivates us to keep learning, the value of community engagement and what it means to promote a growth mindset in the workplace. Attendees from across a spectrum of roles will come away with ideas that they can implement the moment they are back in the office.

This talk aims to answer questions that even your most skilled developer won't know they need to ask.

Group product manager Ebi and engineering manager Gergely tells their story on how product and engineering evolved at Uber over years, in the middle of hypergrowth, going from the “versus” mindset to a productive and balanced relationship. A place where reporting lines are still separate, but product managers have 1:1s with engineers, engineers initiate and contribute to customer-facing projects and engineering managers cultivate and grow product-minded engineers.

You will walk away with tools you can apply in vastly improving your relationship with the product, as an engineering manager. We’ll also cover coaching techniques engineering and product leaders use to grow product-minded engineers, and the productivity, morale, and retention gains this approach results in.

I also can’t imagine working on anything more fulfilling.

Saying I work in Internal Products I often hear back "oh, like your finance systems, keeping those running, right?", and while we do have Finance and they need software to do their jobs, Internal Products is so much more than keeping the lights on.

It's also different from building systems like FT.com, the focus of our Customer Products team. Yes, our audiences are smaller, traffic is less, browser support is simpler, but what makes this work both exciting and humbling is the fact that your users typically use these tools all day long. Every day. So it's in your developer hands whether these people - your colleagues, your friends - feel their job is fulfilling and productive, or a 9-to-5 wrestling match with bad software.

In this talk I will take you through what we do in Internal Products at the Financial Times, how the team came to be, some of the mistakes we’ve made and learned from, and where we’re headed in 2020.

However, the first flush of enthusiasm to instigate sweeping changes can be quashed when you realise that simply having a good idea and a lot of passion isn’t enough. Maybe you’ll be asked “why do we need to change this, it’s fine as it is?” Then there’s the challenge of who “owns” the processes you want to change (clue: usually several people with differing opinions). And finally, “inertia from apathy” – no one actively opposes your idea, but it just doesn’t catch on. Congratulations, you’ve come up against catch-22 of moving into leadership – you have a little bit of “power” but nowhere near enough to drive the sort of change you now aspire to. Worse still you now have better visibility and can see many other things that you think need fixing!

This talk is a story about maturing into a lead role within a growing startup. It’s about learning to maximise your influence without being overly constrained by whatever your remit is “on paper”. It’s about finding your voice. You’ll hear about attempts to influence (successes and failures) and how company growth can keep you on your toes as tactics that worked in your 5-person team are no longer effective at 50. Finally, you’ll learn about the approach that has been the most successful yet. This approach focuses on finding your acorn – that tiny idea for change that will grow when planted in the right place – and having the confidence and patience that eventually you’ll get to your oak!

In this talk, we'll explore strategies for improving our ability to go from strategy sessions, 1:1s, planning meetings, interviews, steering committees, email, design docs, and more in that almost athletic back-to-back life of an engineering manager or director in a highly complex tech company environment.

When Julius Caesar entered Rome with his army by crossing the river Rubicon, he did something that couldn’t be undone ever again. In your journey as a leader, avoid mistakes that are difficult to correct later. Here are a set of practices that you want to adopt as soon as possible.

At Spotify, we have historically built services based on our own proprietary messaging protocol and framework. Last year we finally kicked off the daunting multi-year task of migrating everything to gRPC.

Migrating over 1000 services to gRPC poses interesting challenges, many of them are not only technical in nature: they boil down to questions of engineering culture and leadership at scale: How do you get 200 autonomous engineering teams to align on something as fundamental and cross-cutting as a new RPC framework? How do you roll-out gRPC at scale whit minimal disruption to both the organization and to the end-user?

This presentation will address these questions alongside more technical discussions of advanced gRPC concepts such as interceptors, deadlines, and effective schema management and how they are essential in large distributed systems.

We can answer all these questions by better understanding how people make decisions. Based on Nobel Prize psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman's studies, this presentation will explore the invisible forces influencing our choices and present a systematic approach for better decision-making in the context of software design and engineering.

Whether in a technical or managerial role, we all have to make countless decisions as part of our day-to-day jobs. Some of these decisions are insignificant, while others can have a major impact. Ultimately, the success of the business – and our careers – heavily depends on the choices we make.

So how do we make better, more conscious decisions? In this talk, we will first explore how our brains make decisions in the face of uncertainty. We will then review common cognitive biases: invisible forces that trip us up through error and prejudice. For each common bias, we will examine real examples of software projects and provide you with practical steps to avoid these cognitive traps and make better decisions throughout your career.

The industry is changing and mentorship and communication skills are no longer optional for engineers. In this talk, I will share what happens when this invisible work is not only made visible, but is encouraged, rewarded, and celebrated. Far from hypothetical, this is a case study from my own team, and I will share practical tips on raising the bar and building a well rounded, high performing and resilient team that absolutely anyone can incorporate into their processes.

In the end, though, only one design ever flew passengers in significant numbers, the Anglo-French Concorde. Why? What set the work of British and French engineers apart from competing efforts and allowed them to succeed where other nations failed? Let’s see what we can learn about constraints and compromise from this remarkable story.

As leaders and managers, it is vital that we articulate clearly and concisely what ‘high performing’ means, and what skills and behaviours our people need to develop and grow. If we fail to do this, we are failing to set them up for success - but how can we provide a consistent standard while still allowing for individual variation in strengths, interests, aptitudes, and so on?

In attempting to answer this question for my own organisation, I developed a flexible model that can be used as a basis for these all-important conversations - I would like to share this with you as a tool for maintaining fairness while recognising the unique mix of abilities in each person on your team.

But there is another story, that tech has fuelled climate change in many ways, and is continuing to do so. It is a story that many in the tech world are unaware of, but on that needs to be told.

Over the past couple of years I’ve been researching the impact of the world of tech on Climate Change, and what is being done by some of the big tech companies to mitigate (or not!) their impacts on the world.

I will touch on positive and negative impacts, what individuals and companies can do, and also, what changes are likely to be coming up in the next 10 years both in terms of the impacts of Climate Change, and in terms of possible political movements and social changes that could make a difference for businesses and technologists.

Now in 2020 we stand with the Difficult Second Album ahead of us. How do we beat - in fact how do we even match - the killer debut? How do we make sure our second opus is less like The Stone Roses’ ‘The Second Coming’ and more like Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’?

In this talk, Simon Young - Director of Software Engineering & Architecture at The LEGO Group - will take you through the key success factors of the LEGO.com engineering transformation to date, look at the challenges of running a serverless-based platform at scale and consider how to maintain that architectural flexibility as the serverless landscape continues to evolve and the product and the teams responsible for the product scale to meet ever-increasing expectations.

Success stories like WhatsApp show that an exclusive focus on these as your primary user base can set a startup apart in a competitive field.

Sitati will unpack some of these false assumptions, and discuss tools & approaches for a more inclusive internet.

In this talk, we “relive the codebase” by tracing its evolution, exploring how changes over the years bend, break and fix quality and architecture; how history shapes future. We mine the huge, largely latent version control data and through the lens of everyday Git commits, explore successes, vulnerabilities and hotspots in the codebase. Join me to hear about how at Atlassian, we leveraged “git driven data” to tame our monolith, refactor the right way and minimise tech debt.

I aim to help us navigate delegation and bring the team up in a low-stress way.

• Carving out chunks of responsibilities: identify opportunities that our team members could take on and sponsor the best person for the task.
• Setting expectations: strike an agreement with the team member on how “great work” looks like.
• Coaching: ask the team member questions to help them come up with their own solutions to tackle the challenge.
• Holding them accountable: give radically candid feedback on whether “great work” was achieved and have them take ownership of the result.