Web Directions Code Leaders 2022

A large part of our roles as engineering leaders is how we relate to the people we work with. For many managers, this brings in anxiety and stress - What will people think of me? How do I keep myself and my team focused on the important tasks? How do I know if we’re making progress toward our goals? How can I view challenges from another perspective to help guide the team?

In 2021 I found that many answers to these questions have come by practising easy-to-follow Stoic exercises and using Stoicism to help shape how I approach my work. In this presentation, I’ll share what those exercises are, how I’ve applied them to my work as an Engineering Manager, and how I’ve subtly applied them to how others work with me.

Too much focus already on being a good Eng Manager. Not much on how to manage other managers This presentation is about a simple framework to help young EMs that want to step up in a HoE role

Many find the transition from individual contributor to management is not a next step up the career ladder, it's a new career. A management role requires new skills to tackle a new set of challenges that a lifetime of writing code hasn't prepared them for. Hear how a forward thinking and intentional mentor can provide guidance and opportunities to bring confidence and success during this often difficult career transition.

The labour market is tight right now. Getting staff development right is the biggest lever you have to retain your people and to drive engagement. Tech specific career growth frameworks are the best way to do this, but how do you make sure you have the right one and implement it well?

Engineering teams grow for a variety of different reasons. Maybe it's due to organic growth; Maybe it's growth due to acquisitions or mergers; Maybe you're moving into new markets, building new products ....

What worked for a small engineering org (10-20 people), likely wouldn't scale as you continue to grow your teams.

New questions and challenges start to emerge :

• How do we manage individuals and teams across different locations and time-zones?
• When should we add Engineering leaders, Managers, VPoE etc ?
• Should we have full-stack or domain specific engineers?
• Do I need a dedicated security team?
• How could we scale through partners? What should we keep inhouse vs work with partners?
• How should we balance BAU and Project Work?
• How should backlogs, sprints and work be managed across multiple teams?
• Should we standardise tooling or allow teams to self-manage/self-select?
• When should we add more Scrum Masters, Product Managers and role equivalents?

The intent of this session is to share knowledge based on lived experience to help you with these key questions and your company growth.

Made famous by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, and taken up widely during the pandemic, the 1:1 has become the go to meeting format for people managers in remote and distributed work.

But often, instead of helping develop your people better, 1:1s can get bogged down on working out what to talk about, or turn into a laundry list of project check-ins….So, what is the best way to approach your 1:1s, to set your people up for success?

In this presentation, Tanya and Warwick Pelly share their research on 1:1s - and how you can create greater value from them, in less time.

In this session, Sebastiano is going to bring some light on the difference between Mission, Strategy, Roadmap, KPIs and OKRs, and how they all correlate. Through examples and anecdotes, Sebastiano will go through the process of shifting from strategy to tactics and how one of the main responsibilities for an engineering leader is explicitly making the connection between personal goals (for a manager or an IC) and the organizational mission and strategy.

Sebastiano will also talk about the importance of measuring goals (through OKRs) and how leaders can ensure to stay on tops of those goals.

The people in our teams have extraordinarily potential. As leaders, how can we help our amazing people realise that potential (not just become aware of it, but also step into manifesting it), reaping benefits to both business and people?

I'll tell a story of realising potential, from our Culture Amp Engineering internship program, and then will describe some techniques leaders can use when trying to maximise the potential of people in their team, and considerations when designing programs (such as an internship program) to maximise harnessing potential.

With Core Web Vitals, and Google making these a ranking signal for search results, performance has become increasingly more important. But CWV, and best practice doesn't stand still. We'll hear from Henri Helvetica about the state of performance in 2022, and where the field is headed.

Developers building web applications in 2022 have access to a diverse range of technologies to help deliver exceptional user experiences. From progressive web applications that work offline to applications that rival their native counterparts, there’s never been a more exciting time to build for the web. However, building these applications is time consuming and often results in a disjointed website experience, often powered by lots of web apps built in isolation by different teams.

During the last two and half years at REA, we’ve been building out a micro frontend architecture to address these problems. Inspired by micro services, this style of architecture allows companies to scale up their teams whilst still enabling these same teams to rapidly build web apps that form part of a larger, connected experience. I’ll take you on a quick trip down the micro frontend rabbit hole, showing you just enough to help you decide whether this architecture is something you should consider at your company.

The Web Platform, and browser capabilities have undergone an explosion in innovation over the last several years, from new CSS features, to offline capabilties, deeper OS integration and more. In this session Thomas Steiner, Developer Relations Engineer on Google Chrome gives an overview of the Web's capabilities today, and the direction they are headed.