nor(DEV):con 2024
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
How To Protect Yourself From the Biggest Internet Threats
Introduction To Property Based Testing In (Mostly) C#
Predict The Future (With Old-School Maths)
Authentic Storytelling
by Elle Overvoorde
Rethinking Content Modelling For Unfogettable User Experiences
GenAI For Automating Business Processes
The Erosion Of Consumer Ownership: From Posession To Subscriptions
Cedar: Next Generation Authz For Your Apps
Escaping The Hype Train
Agile Cambridge 2023
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
A culture of observing: how to get better understanding across the org through observability
Improving engineering performance, the DORA way
To mob, pair, or fly solo?
A game of patterns
Empower your master builders with strategic context
How to deal with uncertainties & risk in complex environments
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 & Nick Smith
Responsible research and innovation
Fixing Feedback
Lean inceptions: how to set your teams up for success
Unleashing the transformational power of play. With Lego. Seriously
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 :)
StaffPlus London 2023
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
The Journey Of A Byline
Running Large Scale Migrations Continuously
How To Not Lose Friends And Alienate Yourself
Scaling Your Influence Through Documentation
Solving The Puzzle Of Staff+ Time Management
Maximising Your Impact When Context Switching
Homebrew’s Greatest Migration: Moving To Github Packages With Zero Downtime
The Dark Side Of Lessons Learned
Working On Software That Is Older Than You
Practical Systems Thinking For Software Engineers
Unmasking Imposters By Debugging Doubts
Delivering A Digital-First BBC - An Architect’s Perspective
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
Working Sideways
Scaling Your Influence When You Can Only Be In One Place
The Dark Side Of Standardisation
Librarian’s Guide To Documentation
by Kaitlyn Tierney
Building A Diverse And Inclusive Guild From The Ground Up
Setting Goals As A Staff+ Engineer
DDD South West 11
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
User Testing In Production
High Performance .Net JSON Serialization With Code Generation
Event Sourcing Using .Net, CosmosDB And Elastic
There’s No Such Thing As Plain Text
DDD South West 10
DDD South West returned for its 10th event a few weeks ago. With it came a few new organisers, plus a brand new venue which was great. I took the opportunity to have a long weekend in Bristol, a city that I always enjoy visiting.
The Source Code Generation Game
Exploring Minimal .Net
Data Scientists: Making Shit Up Since 1974
Why Premature Optimisation Is The Root Of All Evil
by Craig Jones
Let’s Stop Blaming Our Users For Getting Hacked When It Is Our Problem To Solve
