Welcome to the meetup for technical leaders! This event is hosted by Squarespace in New York.

⏰ Schedule

• 6:30pm - Arrive, refreshments & networking
• 7:00pm - Welcome
• 7:05pm - Logan McDonald
• 7:25pm - Yaphi Berhanu
• 7:35pm - Break
• 7:45pm - Lisa van Gelder
• 8:15pm - Networking
• 9:00pm - Close

🌟 Speakers

Host: Jason Wong (Leadership Coach, Fractional VP of Engineering, Diversity & Inclusion Consultant.)

Speaker: Logan McDonald (Site Reliability Engineer, Buzzfeed)

Bio: Logan is a security-focused Site Reliability Engineer at BuzzFeed, based in New York City. She is a maintainer of BuzzFeed's open source centralized sign-on platform, sso, and has written for dev.to and Increment Magazine. She is obsessed with learning, but especially with the learning process that accompanies onboarding people new to security, operations tooling and concepts. If Logan has a personal brand, she hopes it is "Friendly Neighborhood Operations Engineer."

Talk: Optimizing for Learning

The talk is about the most powerful tool developers have at their disposal: the human mind! Drawing from cognitive science, we'll explore how we can improve how we learn and store information about our systems in order to respond better to incidents and anomalies. Infused with practical examples of how to improve our memory and learning, this talk moves from advice for individuals to how we can form and develop learning teams. It's a talk broken into four parts: preparing to learn, gaining knowledge, building mental models, and enabling a team to learn well together.

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Speaker: Yaphi Berhanu (Sr. Software Engineer, Squarespace)

Bio: Yaphi (rhymes with taffy) is a Senior Software Engineer at Squarespace working on the front end. He appreciates clear user experiences wherever they are. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, writing JavaScript tutorials, and enjoying the gym.

Talk: How to Talk About Your Work Without Diminishing It

The story you tell about your work is as important as the work itself. You can do great work, but if you talk about it the wrong way, you can destroy its impact. For example, the wrong story can diminish your work, hurt your team's credibility, and throw off project estimates. I know because I've messed this up many times.

In this talk, I'll share the hilarious and painful mistakes I've made as well as the strategies I've learned to avoid these mistakes. By the end, you'll hopefully have a better idea of how to talk about your work.

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Speaker: Lisa van Gelder (VP Engineering, Meetup)

Bio: Lisa has been in software for over 18 years and built teams as a VP or SVP since 2015. She has worked in a wide range of companies from early-stage startups to large media companies like the BBC & the Guardian newspaper. She used to debug code, now she debugs teams for a living. Lisa is currently VP, Engineering at Meetup. She is mostly powered by coffee.

Talk: The four components of high performing teams

Do you have a great team & a great mission but don't understand why the pace of delivery is so slow? Architecture & tech stack is only one part of the story

I believe high performing teams need four things to be effective:

• Mastery - The skills & knowledge needed to do a great job, and a clear path to get to the next level.
• Autonomy - The space to figure out their own solution to a problem & how they want to work
• Purpose - A clear sense of direction, and the knowledge of how what they’re working on fits into the big picture & helps their team succeed.
• Safety - A team that is afraid won’t take risks or experiment, a team that is afraid of finger-pointing won’t learn from mistakes.

In this talk I’ll explain why those four things are key to teams being successful and give examples of how I’ve turned teams around by fixing the lack of one or more of them. Audience members will leave with practical examples of how to diagnose & improve the performance of their teams.

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