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I heard of the Lead Dev conference series some time at the end of the last year. There are not many conferences that focus on engineering leaders, most of the technology conferences are focused on specific technologies, methodologies or the business side. It was too late for the Berlin 2019 conference, so I set my eyes on either the London or Berlin 2020 conference. In the end I decided against London, because I wanted to avoid short plane trips as much as possible and staying longer in London also wasn’t an option. Then the COVID-19 thing happened and Lead Dev organisers decided to cancel or postpone some of the 2020 conferences and also offer an online conference: Lead Dev Live 2020. It was a two day conference on April 7 and 8, 2020. Not only was it streamed live, but also completely free. Each day had a single track happening in the afternoon and evening CEST. Streaming was via one long YouTube stream for each day, which was well produced except for some technical issues that were quickly resolved. In parallel to this everybody had access to a Slack community for general chat, topic specific channels and networking. In the end I didn’t watch all of the talks, but most of them. I am just going to list the ones I recommend to watch if you get the chance. Overall I enjoyed the experience, they had some great speakers and some topics I can directly relate to. I noticed that I found the panels more difficult to follow, you get a lot of whitespace between the speakers and there is no consistent story. This makes it easy to lose concentration, check your messages or fetch a new cup of tea. A normal talk with a story and possibly slides can really grab your attention and take you on a journey. One thing that didn’t work at all for me were the Slack channels running in parallel to the talks. The main #leaddev-live channel was very noisy and just flooded with people just saying hello. Any announcements flew past so fast that it was pretty much unusable. Something like a channel only for announcements would have been more useful. You also run very quickly into the usual Slack problem of having too many channels and then too many notifications. I definitely would join another conference by Lead Dev. I might even pay for it. Would I go to a real Lead Dev conference? Yes, but only if it is close to me. I wouldn’t spend the time and money required to travel further than maybe a two hour flight. Day 1 The first day was focused on the effects of COVID-19 on management and remote work. YouTube stream day 1 Leading teams through times of uncertainty and upheaval [Panel] Camille Fournier, Lara Hogan, Rachana Kumar and Christian McCarrick https://youtu.be/yxiDblyYkrI Good insight into how different companies and engineering approach the crisis with some well known guests. Minimum Viable Business Continuity Management Meri Williams https://youtu.be/TCu0gJ_hLq8 Talking about all kinds of aspects of continuity management. From risk assessment, testing, planning and communication. Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software [Panel] Dan Berry, Jai Chakrabarti, Bryan Liles and Erica Stanley https://youtu.be/lsgbGRkysJE Rebuild or refactor in many words. Day 2 The second day was more of a mix of different topics. YouTube stream day 2 Tradeoffs on the road to Observability Liz Fong-Jones https://youtu.be/wkXKbC1GWIM Keep SRE and observability boring. Use the tools that you can easily obtain instead of reinventing the wheel. Designing effective OKRs [Panel] Aniela Crisan, Whitney O'Banner, Antonio Verardi and Heidi Waterhouse https://youtu.be/tBchi7FzRFU Panel about OKRs in general and in tech teams. I really enjoyed Whitney’s take on this. Her talk from 2019 “Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team” is also worth a watch. Another related talk watching from 2018, which was also played during one of the technical glitches in this conference is “Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers” by Melinda Seckington. Apps, stacks, and frameworks: avoiding “Shiny Object” syndrome Angel Rivera https://youtu.be/Zk9Rg0Hswu0 This talk was quite random, but still interesting. He talked about his experience of using a new shiny technology (MongoDB) without having any expertise in this himself or in the team. Risky business: taking risks in production Matthew Hawthorne and Leemay Nassery https://youtu.be/Np8NFmjLn4Q How to manage risk by using a/b tests, metrics, testing, … Building and conveying vision [Panel] Neha Batra, Lawrence Bruhmuller, Kevin Goldsmith and Maria Gutierrez https://youtu.be/I9-_4WYUEhE How to create and convey a message to your team.

Swift: Google’s bet on differentiable programming https://tryolabs.com/blog/2020/04/02/swift-googles-bet-on-differentiable-programming/ Register now for the DevOps Online Summit 2020! https://www.devopsonlinesummit.com/2020 getlon.lat — Help! I need a geocoder. https://getlon.lat/ A Day in the Life of a Backend Product Engineer at Slack* https://slack.engineering/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-backend-product-engineer-at-slack-e786a8a08fc4 Build versus buy. https://lethain.com/build-vs-buy/ 3 steps for leaders to take in emergencies https://larahogan.me/blog/3-steps-for-leaders-in-emergencies/ Paper debugging https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/paper-debugging/ 10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL https://medium.com/@rbranson/10-things-i-hate-about-postgresql-20dbab8c2791 Knative https://knative.dev/ Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-amazon-and-common-enemies/ All Microsoft events will be held online until July 2021 https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/microsoft-events-held-online-july-2021 Announcing the Compose Specification https://www.docker.com/blog/announcing-the-compose-specification/ Introducing our new book “Building Secure and Reliable Systems https://security.googleblog.com/2020/04/introducing-our-new-book-building.html The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-majestic-monolith-can-become-the-citadel/ One Team at Uber is Moving from Microservices to Macroservices http://highscalability.com/blog/2020/4/8/one-team-at-uber-is-moving-from-microservices-to-macroservic.html The Citadel Architecture at AppSignal https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/08/the-citadel-architecture-at-appsignal.html ...

Goto: A Dozen New Masterclasses Are Now LIVE! https://blog.gotocon.com/2020/04/02/a-dozen-new-masterclasses-are-now-live/ Changing the Approach to Debugging in Ruby with TracePoint https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/01/changing-the-approach-to-debugging-in-ruby-with-tracepoint.html AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/01/appsignal-now-supports-node-roadmap-for-the-coming-weeks.html Code Search for Google open source projects https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/04/code-search-for-google-open-source.html Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-You-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366/ See Everyone with the Google Meet Grid View Extension https://www.controlaltachieve.com/2020/03/meet-grid-view.html Optimizing Ruby Lazy Initialization in TruffleRuby with Deoptimization https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/optimizing-ruby-lazy-initialization-in-truffleruby-with-deoptimization Eclipse Theia Offers a ‘True Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code’ https://thenewstack.io/eclipse-theia-offers-a-true-open-source-alternative-to-visual-studio-code/ Pay Analysis Update: Examining Equal Pay at Buffer in 2020 https://open.buffer.com/2020-pay-analysis/ PlanITPoker https://www.planitpoker.com/ RailsConf 2020.2 Couch Edition http://railsconf.com/ xkcd: Pathogen Resistance https://xkcd.com/2287/ Tech Debt and the Pragmatic Middle Ground https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/tech-debt/ Fedora’s Git forge decision https://lwn.net/Articles/816282/ dry-rails https://dry-rb.org/gems/dry-rails/0.1/ Deploys at Slack https://slack.engineering/deploys-at-slack-cd0d28c61701 CentOS: Git Forge decision https://blog.centos.org/2020/03/git-forge-decision/ ...

"One click" deploy (*) Recently our CEO Raj Kumar spent a week in our Barcelona office where the majority of our engineering department is located. I was working on some ideas for him to meet the team and get some insights into our daily work. While most of the company is aware of UI/UX and front-end changes we are doing to our site, some of the back-end and infrastructure work can seem like black magic. I think it is important to take every opportunity to bring this output closer to the rest of the company and especially the leadership. By chance I watched the very good presentation “Getting Real about Managing up” by Kellan Elliott-McCrea, which contains as one example the idea of letting your CEO deploy to production. One of the goals of our engineering team is continuous deployment. I set this out when I joined Devex to give us a far goal to aim for. I was inspired by Etsy’s Code as Craft blog and the book “Web Operations”. For me the important part was not continuous deployment itself, but all the changes in engineering culture required to achieve it. You need a good technical base from unit to integration tests, infrastructure as a code, continuous integration and a infrastructure team that is working side by side with the developers. At the beginning this seemed to be an impossible task, QA and deployment were completely manual, there was no unit testing, no code reviews, a clear separation between developers and operations. The code itself was a mess too, with lots of moving parts, outdated libraries and no easy way to introduce testing. But we slowly made progress, simplified the system and slowly worked our way up from deploying once in a blue moon, to once, then twice a week. Currently we are at one deploy a day, with some manual involvement of QA. The deployment gets kicked off by a chatbot and is well documented in our engineering handbook. The short version looks like this: Check QA status Tell the chatbot to deploy Check the metrics Everybody in the engineering team is already in the rotation of deploys and it is easy enough for everyone in the company to do it. Our CEO Raj Kumar was happy to do it and sat together with our two infrastructure engineers to help him along. Because there are some permission requirements it was also easier to do it from the workstation of our lead engineer. After some hiccups in QA the progress went smoothly and we had a new release in production. I guess in the end he was surprised how boring it turned out to be. Which a deploy should be. btw: we are hiring: Check out our current open positions *) the hat is part of the deploy protocol and not a fashion statement

My Pandemic Zoom Setup https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2020/3/26/my-pandemic-zoom-setup Two Years With Rust http://brooker.co.za/blog/2020/03/22/rust.html Helping FOSS conferences in the face of a pandemic https://lwn.net/Articles/815913/ O’Reilly shutting down its conference group https://lwn.net/Articles/815966/ https://www.oreilly.com/conferences/from-laura-baldwin.html How to Run a Successful Online Conference https://ianlandsman.com/run-an-online-conference/ Video conferencing with Jitsi https://lwn.net/Articles/815751/ Remote Working: The home office desks of Basecamp https://m.signalvnoise.com/remote-working-the-home-office-desks-of-basecamp/ The Housekeeping of the Intangible https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-housekeeping-of-the-intangible/ ...