Web Directions Code Leaders 2019 Leading Engineering Teams

npm has more data than anyone about who JavaScript developers are and what they’re up to. Using their unparalleled access to registry usage stats and the results of their 2019 ecosystem survey of over 33,000 developers, CTO Laurie Voss breaks down the current state of JavaScript and where trends look like they’re headed, so you can make more informed technical choices.

It's not uncommon for teams to need to bring on additional talent to achieve tight deadlines and drive growth. Often these roles are advertised as "Senior Engineers", and the skills list the ability to "hit the ground running", "get in and get stuff done" or "start shipping features from day one." However is this a realistic expectation or, are we setting our new employees up for failure?

In this presentation, Cath Jones will discuss the expectations placed on new technical hires with a focus on senior roles. She will guide you in examining the complexities of information that needs to be provided to an employee before they can contribute meaningfully to your organisation, and demonstrate how scalable on-boarding practices will allow your organisation to achieve greater productivity and engagement from new hires.

At the centre of most successful tech startups is a highly productive and trusting relationship between co-founders. Even if they don't start out with distinct 'product' and 'tech' roles, it's not uncommon for founders to end up in tech and product leadership positions as the company grows, and in these cases, product culture really forms around them – but replicating the attributes of the relationship itself does not happen automatically.

What can we do to build strong bonds between tech leads and product managers in cross-functional product teams as a company scales? I will share the things we're trying at Culture Amp, and some of the things we've learned along the way.

Our industry undeniably suffers from a lack of gender balance amongst hands-on technologists. Even fewer of those technologists are mothers. Sadly, many women believe that you can’t remain technical once you become a mother. But there are small changes that we as leaders can make to support our team members as they transition back into the workforce.

In this talk, Sarah will share with you her experience, including the challenges she faced, of returning to a senior technical role after starting a family. You will hear the changes she made within her company to make it easier for others to see how to return and stay technical, and the benefits to her company of having her and others like her able to return to work.

Sarah hopes her experience will provide some inspiration and practical advice to share with your software engineers and tech leads who are contemplating motherhood, and for leaders who are committed to supporting diversity in their workplace.

As developers we want to always be using the latest and greatest techniques and frameworks and try new things, but at leaders we need to weigh this up against training time, consistency between projects and the longevity and support of the framework.

As a lead for over 30 Front-End Developers across Australia, working on 10+ projects at any one time, keeping devs happy and keeping up with technology is a delicate balance. By introducing a few simple rules that govern when and how we include new technologies into projects we've found a happy medium between using new tech and having the wide support and stability of a reusable/common set of frameworks & tools between projects.

As a manager, giving direct and sometimes negative or difficult feedback to people can be hard. If you’re someone with a lot of empathy this can make it even harder, but with empathy can come trust. This is key as trust can foster an environment where direct feedback and even respectful disagreement adds value to your team.

Looking to grow your team? Considering hiring more juniors? Amazing idea, but how to grow them, set them up for success and what are the potential mistakes on your and their part that you need to watch out for?

In this talk Inga Pflaumer will share her experience working with junior team on building a product using Node.js and React, talk about some of their triumphs and failures.

README files are the first thing we all look at when working with a new code base. A good README helps you hit the ground running, and often help you understand the principles behind the code base so you know how to best work with it.

The idea behind a Manager’s README is the same. Like an owner’s manual for a manager, it gives the reader a recipe for how to best work with you.

Manager READMEs have gained a bit of traction recently with managers from Netflix, Slack, Etsy and Shopify using them. Like all popular things, they have also attracted their fair share of controversy.

In this talk Colin Chauvet share how he introduced Manager READMEs at Atlassian. What worked, what didn’t, how to get started and how to avoid coming across as a self-serving jerk!

In this talk Geoff Crain and Aman King will show you what value peer feedback has brought to Atlassian teams, and how to introduce and nurture it within your team.

Devs talk to each other through pull requests and building technical solutions. They have 1-1s with their managers about personal growth. It can be way better than this: enable and encourage your devs to ask for, and structure actionable feedback to each other to foster individual growth, and build empathy and team work.

The world is dying; you can help save it. Data Centres consume 2% of all the power in the world and produce about 3% of the greenhouse gases. This is set to treble in the next 10 years.

When building apps, we focus on minimising costs, time to market, bugs, bundle size, application speed, SEO, but we spend almost no effort trying to minimise the damage our applications are making to the environment. In this talk we'll discuss how to write, deploy and run a green sustainable application.