Blog

Last Friday we held the inaugural The Lead Developer – a new conference for technical leads. Sessions were curated to be a mix of practical advice on leading and motivating a team, and high-level sessions on new and disruptive technologies. We launched this conference in response to the paradox facing technical managers: when you’re busy leading a team, coding and maintaining standards, how do you stay ahead of new technologies and develop yourself as a technical lead? Here’s a look at how it went.

The Lead Developer conference chair, Meri Williams, is a geek, a manager, and a manager of geeks. She’s a CTO and consults through ChromeRose, helping digital and technical teams be brilliant. Meri has led global teams ranging in size from 30 to 300. She’s also an experienced speaker, and we’re thrilled to welcome her as chair of The Lead Developer. Read on to find out why Meri was keen to get involved in The Lead Developer and what she hopes it will help technical leads to achieve.

Businesses have long-term goals. Software products can live for decades. It’s hard to think on these timescales, much less plan for them. In this guest post, Technical Lead Chris Henry outlines the process he went through to come up with a five year plan for technical transformation.

Guest blogger and brand new technical lead, Sam Partington, shares his vision for the perfect Lead Dev that he would like to become, and explains why it’s OK to be idealistic from time to time.

Sometimes you need to step away from what you’re doing in order to see if it could be done more effectively. The Lead Developer conference has been programmed taking into account the unique challenges faced by technical leads, and sessions are designed to equip you with tools and strategies to make you 10X more efficient at your job.

The Lead Developer is a new conference designed specifically with the leaders of technical teams in mind and will bring together industry experts delivering technical sessions, practical advice on leading and motivating teams, and tools and strategies for efficiency. In addition to the ten 30-minute conference sessions, we will have six lightning talks and we welcome your submissions for these. Please send us your talk proposal by 29 May at midnight GMT.