LDX3 London 2025 (Day 1)

This June, for the fourth time, I was lucky enough to be able to head into London for the annual LeadDev conference, this time updated and renamed to LDX3. LeadDev is increasingly popular, and had outgrown the space at the Barbican, so this year was held at the Intercontinental at the O2. Previous years had separated the LeadDev, Staff+ and Leading Eng tracks, so if you had tickets to one, you couldn’t go and see talks on a different track. This year, it was one big conference, so apart from a separate Director+ area, anyone could see any of the talks.

As a space, the Intercontinental worked ok. The Barbican is a unique venue with a lot of character, so it’s difficult to replace that vibe. The Intercontinental was essentially a giant square hotel ballroom, surrounded by scrub land (although with a pretty cool view of Canary Wharf). The LeadDev team had done a good job jazzing up the space with lights and screens but the stages, even for the main Organisational Leadership track, were small compared to the Barbican, and I definitely missed the lovely comfortable Barbican raked seating, with perfect sightlines from wherever you chose to sit.

Water Monitoring

In some of my previous posts, I talked about my journey towards monitoring every aspect of my home. For a long time now I’ve been measuring temperatures, electricity and gas usage, solar power and more. One area that has been on my target list from the start was our water usage - not least because a few years ago we had a leak that went undetected until it became a fairly significant problem. Recently while my plumber was doing our annual gas boiler service I asked him to fit a water meter which has allowed me to finally start tracking this data.

The key discovery that allowed me to do this was that you can get “pulsed” water meters (I used this model from B-Meters). They come preequipped with an inductive reader, and have a couple of wires you can connect to that receive a pulse for every litre of water used. Installing the meter was relatively straightforward for my plumber, despite the cramped space he had available.

LeadDev London 2024 (Day 2)

This is the second part of my write up of the LeadDev London 2024 conference. To read my thoughts on the talks from day 1, and my overall impression of the conference please read my previous post. As with that post this is just the summary of my notes, so will give you a flavour of the talks. This should help you decide if you want to pay for a digital pass to access the videos, or if enough time has passed to look them up on YouTube or the LeadDev site.

In the afternoon I attended a workshop by a couple of Google engineers on DORA. I’ve watched the recording of the talks I missed, so I’ve included my thoughts on those below. My write-up of the workshop is at the end of this post.

And with that out of the way, on with the talks…

LeadDev London 2024 (Day 1)

In what is fast becoming an annual tradition I recently switched on my Slack out-of-office, packed up a bag with plenty of room left for some conference swag, and got on the train to the Barbican for LeadDev London 2024 (see my review of 2022 day 1 and day 2, and 2023 day 1 and day 2). As with last year, this is a one-track conference focused on leadership and engineering management, with a separate one-track conference at the same time, StaffPlus, focused on Staff+ engineers. I only have a ticket to LeadDev, so I only got to see those talks.

What Do You Want From A Team Meeting? A Decision Or A Team?

Most teams will have a team meeting on a regular schedule. Once a week, every two weeks or once a month the team gets together to discuss the day’s big issues. This can be a difficult meeting because it doesn’t have a defined agenda, and is open-ended.

Other meetings either drive a project forward, solve a specific problem or implement a specific process. They might have a varying agenda, but the overall goal of the meeting is (hopefully) clear, and there is a point when the meetings will stop. Barring the team disbanding, this is not true for team meetings.

A common pattern, and one I am certainly guilty of, is asking people what issues they would like to discuss, and perhaps sharing a few updates from around the business. When you get to the end of the agenda you just say “Thanks everyone” and go back to your desks.

The problem with this is that you are encouraging people to just bring existing problems to the table, and then only if you manage to get the culture to be non-threatening enough that they feel comfortable with sharing their issues with the group.