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.
