Dev meeting – the Lead Dev conference

Chris went to the Lead Dev conference a few weeks ago. It is a single-track conference; there are many short talks, and there’s no need to choose between them.

There are four main areas that Chris focussed on: misc things; making teams work well; diversity and hiring; and operations. These are some of the talks he went to.

Nickolas Means told stories – this time about the building of the Eiffel Tower, and how it is relevant to software development. He talked about how to get things done – you need to do networking, self-promotion, and negotiation – better thought of as “making friends, telling stories, and co-operating”. He thinks that team leads shouldn’t be, um umbrellas entirely protecting a team from what’s going on in a business, but should instead be heat shields that reduce the impact of these things.

James Birnie talked about Quantum Cryptography, and how we should all be worried that governments can record encrypted network traffic now that can be decrypted in a few years.

Lara Hogan talked about dealing with friction in teams – “Forming”, “Storming”, “Norming” and “Performing”. When you feel under attack, you become defensive and you don’t make good decision. Instead, think about peoples’ core needs – Belonging, Improvement, Choice, Equality, Predictability, and Significance. If there are problems in a team, then it may be because one or more of these needs isn’t being met. Lara has several blog posts on these topics.

Paula Kennedy talked about Silence Isn’t Golden – how to deal with distributed teams. They had a weekly standup to discuss things inside and outside woek; a monthly retrospective to discuss team functioning; and having a regular “coffee break” meeting.

Bethan Vincent talked about increasing diversity in hiring. She discussed the issues with a fully anonymized process, which didn’t work very well for various reasons. She talked about the importance of plenty of information in job listings, and the issues of mandatory take home tests for people who have limited time available. We discussed this more, because this is an area where we’ve been putting in effort internally.

Kate Beard talked about 10% time at the FT, working on side projects, and its relevance to diversity. Without that, people who have limited free time outside work are not able to do side projects, which limits their learning opportunities and career development.

Ola Sitarska talked about diversity again. She discussed code review as an interview technique.

Steve Williams talked about teams performing in crisis situations. Companies don’t plan for business crises as well as they should. He discussed his experience volunteering for the RNLI. It’s important to think about appropriate roles and responsibilites; rituals to follow; carrying out exercises. He also talked about “SMEAC” – Situation/Scenario – Mission – Execution – Admin – Comms, where you’re thrown into a situation and then need to deal with it (also known as Five Paragraph Order). We talked about how you could arrange a communication process in the event of a disaster, and how to manage disaster recovery processes.

All of the conference sessions are available online.