Welcome to the meetup for technical leaders! This event is hosted by Cloudflare in London.

⏰ Schedule

• 6:30pm - Arrive, refreshments & networking
• 7:00pm - Welcome
• 7:05pm - Talk 1
• 7:35pm - Break
• 7:50pm - Talk 2
• 8:20pm - Networking
• 9:00pm - Close

🌟 Speakers

Speaker: Callum Whyte (Independent Contractor)

Bio: Callum is a lead developer who's expertise lies in building robust scalable microservice and serverless systems on the .NET stack, as well as Xamarin mobile apps and websites with the Umbraco CMS.

Away from his desk you can find him organising community events; from local meetups and hackathons to the annual 300 person Umbraco UK Festival conference. He’s an active contributor to open source projects, as well as co-host of a weekly YouTube series “UmbraCoffee” and a regular speaker at events all over the world!

Talk: Climbing the growth mountain

How do you rapidly scale a project team 6 fold in a matter of weeks? How do you train a growing team on an unfamiliar technology whilst under pressure to deliver? As a leader how can you be sure your team has what they need to succeed?

Callum will share the challenges faced and lessons learnt while rapidly scaling a team to transition an app for the NHS from a messy inherited codebase to a clean microservices architecture in a matter of weeks.

Using this experience as an example, we’ll take a look at how to craft a smooth onboarding process for people of every discipline (developers, QA, designers, PMs) and the important role that documentation and planning plays. Finally, we’ll explore the impact that a growing team can have on the leader themselves - the mental burden and how to reduce pressures, the importance of having a mentor, and how to maintain a good relationship with the team when the project gets tough.

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Speaker: Melinda Seckington (Technical Manager, FutureLearn)

Bio: Melinda is a Technical Manager at FutureLearn, a social learning platform. She loves attending BarCamps, Hackdays and other tech meetups, and since 2009 has been organising them at Geeks of London. She also writes at MissGeeky, a blog about all things geeky and girly.

Talk: Level Up: Developing Developers

It’s rare that in the tech industry we’ll stick with one single job. As developers, we’re constantly learning: whether it’s figuring out how to solve new problems, learning new skills and technologies, or switching to a completely new role, we’re in an industry that requires constant change.

As leads, we should make it easier for developers to understand what options are available to them, allow them to make time for learning and provide structures and processes for them to develop the skills that they want and need for future roles.

This talk will look at how you can help level up your developers by using competencies and career development frameworks, what types of processes you can introduce to support personal development and how developers should be using opportunities like these to get a better understanding of what skills they should focus on.

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The Lead Developer is an international series of conferences and meetups for tech leaders in London, Austin, New York and Berlin. Check out 100+ talk videos on imposter syndrome, leading and scaling technical teams, and lots more at theleaddeveloper.com.