The Lead Developer conference

This week I attended Lead Developer, a conference for technical leaders. Lead Developer is organized as a series a conferences around the world. I've attended it in London, but there was one in NYC in April and there's one in Austin TX planned for December 2018.

For me, a conference us usually something purely technical, with a bunch of people sharing code and telling stories about solving problems. Lead Developer was rather different. Its main topics are leadership, soft skills, communication and efficient management - exactly what I was looking for lately.

The quality of the event was very high: all speakers were well prepared, M.C. was professional and funny, all talks were subtitled, there was even a chillout room and a mindfulness session.

Was it worth £700 to attend? If you work for a small-ish company, the answer is absolutely yes. If you're at a larger company like Shopify, where there's a lot of internal resources and training available, it's probably worth attending too, but not too certainly. Out of 23 talks, there's been maybe 4 or 5 that were extremely valuable for me. For the rest of talks, I've already learned much of that from those 3 years that I've spent at Shopify.

I could probably watch those few talks without going to the conference, but the thing is that you never know what talks to watch if you haven't been there.

Below is a list of talks that in my opinion are worth sharing.

Written in July 2018.
Kir Shatrov

Kir Shatrov helps businesses to grow by scaling the infrastructure. He writes about software, scalability and the ecosystem. Follow him on Twitter to get the latest updates.