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I attended the latest DDD South West last weekend. It’s become one of my favourite of the DDD events, partly because of the venue and the relaxed feeling of the conference, but also because of Bristol - one of my favourite cities in the UK.

#FAIL

by Kevlin Henney Twitter BlueSky Mastodon

Confident Communication For Developers

by Aaron Green

An Above Average Tech Ecosystem

by Jennifer D Daniel Twitter

Celibrate You’re Misteaks

by Joe Glombek Website Mastodon Video

Debugging: More Than Breakpoints And Log Analysis

by Rachel Breeze Website Twitter BlueSky Mastodon

Rest, gRPC, GraphQL Or Asynchronous Messaging

by Poornima Nayar Website Twitter

I was at nor(DEV):con a few weeks ago. It’s the first time I’ve been to this event, event though it’s fairly local to me and has been running for many years.

The Heat Death Of Enterprise IT

by Garth Gilmour & Eamonn Boyle Twitter Twitter Website Video

How To Protect Yourself From the Biggest Internet Threats

by Ignat Korchagin Website Twitter

Introduction To Property Based Testing In (Mostly) C#

by Steve Love Website Twitter Slides

Predict The Future (With Old-School Maths)

by Dani Papamaximou Twitter

Authentic Storytelling

by Elle Overvoorde

Rethinking Content Modelling For Unfogettable User Experiences

by Esther Agbaje Twitter

GenAI For Automating Business Processes

by Maryleen Amaizu Twitter

The Erosion Of Consumer Ownership: From Posession To Subscriptions

by Alexio Rodrigues Twitter

Cedar: Next Generation Authz For Your Apps

by Ricardo Sueiras Website Twitter Mastodon

Escaping The Hype Train

by Anna Aitchison Website

Last week, I spent a few days at Agile Cambridge. I’ve been to this conference once before back in 2014, where I gave a talk on whether agile can work for off-the-shelf software. I was also speaking this year, but about “Tracking the Unmeasurable with OKRs”. Overall, it was an enjoyable conference as it gave me time away from code, and enough headspace to think about the processes involved in writing software without the details of the tech used to do it.

Five reflections for modern leaders

by Marcin Floryan Website Twitter Mastodon

A culture of observing: how to get better understanding across the org through observability

by Apostolis Apostolidis Website Twitter Slides

Improving engineering performance, the DORA way

by Carlo Beschi Twitter

To mob, pair, or fly solo?

by Chris Oldwood Website Twitter

A game of patterns

by Tiani Jones Twitter

Empower your master builders with strategic context

by Cei Sanderson Website Twitter Video

How to deal with uncertainties & risk in complex environments

by Maik Wojcieszak Website Twitter

Agile song-writing workshop

by Farah Egby

Something about the title of this workshop drew my attention, and always willing to try something new and to step out of my comfort zone, I went along. In the 90 minute session, a group of about 12 wrote and performed an original song, inspired by our love/hate of agile. We did this by first decomposing the song into its constituent parts (a chorus and three verses). We collectively worked on the chorus, which would have an uplifting feel to highlight the positives of agile. We then split into three groups, where each group worked on a different verse. After several minutes, we rotated to iterate on the verse created by a different group. We did this again until each group had worked on all three verses.

It was now time to put the lyrics to a melody. Farah had come pre-prepared with a chord progression and some suggeted styles, so we didn’t have to start completely from scratch. After a few false starts, a melody started to emerge. It wasn’t long before we had our completed masterpiece.

It was an interesting idea for a session, and one which I enjoyed taking part in. The following day, some of our group performed the song on stage in the welcome session at the start of the day - I chose to offer moral support from the audience.

How to be agile with critical national priorities

by Anna Sherrington and Nick Smith Twitter Mastodon

Responsible research and innovation

by Cat Swetel Twitter Mastodon

Fixing Feedback

by Ceri Newton-Sargunar Twitter

Lean inceptions: how to set your teams up for success

by Marcel Britsch Video

Unleashing the transformational power of play. With Lego. Seriously

by Robb Lockwood Website Twitter

For my last session of the conference I chose to attend Robb’s session. I mainly chose this because it involved Lego, something which I have had a strong interest in since I was a child. Robb showed how using a small set of just 50 Lego pieces, insights can be discovered to aid with the coaching process. It was also fun to build some simple models as the workshop progressed, including one challenge of “build a tower with you in it”. We also got to keep the Lego at the end of the session :)

I spent a few days this week at the first ever StaffPlus London, a conference for senior individual contributors being run alongside the LeadDev London event. The conference was compèred by Tanya Reilly, author of The Staff Engineer’s Path.

Unlinke other conferences I’ve been to, there was only one track which made choosing what sessions to see quite easy. The talks were of varying lengths, and there were a lot of them, which made sketchnoting them quite a task.

Filling The Jar Of Impact And Trust As A Principal Engineer

by Nayana Shetty Twitter

The Journey Of A Byline

by Alice Bartlett Website Twitter

Running Large Scale Migrations Continuously

by Suhail Patel Website Twitter Mastodon

How To Not Lose Friends And Alienate Yourself

by Waheed El Miladi Twitter

Scaling Your Influence Through Documentation

by James Ford Twitter

Solving The Puzzle Of Staff+ Time Management

by Blanca Garcia Gil Website Twitter Slides

Maximising Your Impact When Context Switching

by Maude Lemaire Website Twitter

Homebrew’s Greatest Migration: Moving To Github Packages With Zero Downtime

by Mike McQuaid Website Twitter Mastodon Slides

The Dark Side Of Lessons Learned

by Dianing Yudono Website Twitter Mastodon

Working On Software That Is Older Than You

by Sally Wahba Website Twitter Mastodon

Practical Systems Thinking For Software Engineers

by Laura Nolan Twitter

Unmasking Imposters By Debugging Doubts

by J Bobby Dorlus Website Twitter

Delivering A Digital-First BBC - An Architect’s Perspective

by Hannes Ricklefs Twitter

Defining A Technical Visiion

by Eamon Scullion

Putting Down Line Management - Returning To The Individual Contributor Role

by Caroline Handley

Cloud Infrastructure Architecuture For Nubank’s Global Expansion

by Lais Oliviera

Building A Shared Vision: Creating Alignment Across Autonomous Teams

by Maria Neumayer Website Twitter Mastodon

Working Sideways

by Aish Raj Dahal Website

Scaling Your Influence When You Can Only Be In One Place

by Michael Tweed Twitter

The Dark Side Of Standardisation

by Samantha Schaevitz Twitter Mastodon

Librarian’s Guide To Documentation

by Kaitlyn Tierney

Building A Diverse And Inclusive Guild From The Ground Up

by Liem Pham Twitter

Setting Goals As A Staff+ Engineer

by Sabrina Leandro Website Twitter Mastodon

A few weeks ago I attended DDD South West. It was run very similar to last year’s event, but was much better attended. Here are my sketchnotes of the talks.

Being Staff Plus

by Ian Cooper Website Twitter Mastodon Slides

User Testing In Production

by Eli Holderness Twitter Mastodon

High Performance .Net JSON Serialization With Code Generation

by Ian Griffiths Website Twitter Mastodon

Event Sourcing Using .Net, CosmosDB And Elastic

by James World, Gareth James Twitter

There’s No Such Thing As Plain Text

by Dylan Beattie Website Twitter Mastodon Video