#ldx3 — Public Fediverse posts

We ended the week with a fun "after hours" chat in our #OnTheSide community yesterday.
Topics included:

🛹 Chad skating the US coast-to-coast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZGFKZiP5wQ
🏦 Woz printing his own money https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDw_YqRaRkU
🤳 Trovster taking selfies with farm animals https://www.trovster.com/photos/18796176718
🤖 my thoughts from #LDX3 https://youtu.be/vSNttDnvxTs

Fancy joining us every Monday or Friday? Let me know.

AI/Gemini appears to struggle to accept that people over 30-35 work in tech.

A speaker's slides are all Gemini generated images. None of the tech workers appear to be above 35.

#ageism #ai #tech #ldx3

The next talk #LDX3 is how to stop engineering principles/culture failing under pressure. If you set up a culture, define it, get buy in, but the environment doesn't support it, then the culture will fail and bend according to what the environment demands of it. A culture needs intention and the environment needs to make adhering to those principles easy by removing barriers to do so and putting guardrails to stop going onto well worn but negative paths. It might also be the behaviours in the culture you want to build aren't effective at producing the outcomes you want so you need to review if the behaviours in your culture are working.

For seniors there is less impact of AI because coding is a smaller part of the job, but juniors using AI doesn't slow them down despite more PRs from juniors. It is important to encode your engineering standards into your AI tools to match your internal standards. #LDX3

Okay now more AI stuff #LDX3. Looking at the impact of AI on juniors which is a topic of interest to me. Very interesting from Wise who still have a proper grad scheme and development pipeline. That seems rare nowadays but so important! (It's how I got into this industry). It does now include using AIs and agents as standard and insteads refocuses skills on how to review code rather than craft it (but AI skills are used to assist this, also things like fixing broken CI). They estimate onboarding is now half the time (time to 10 PRs) and are creating twice as many PRs. A lot of focus on taking time away from seniors and have them learn more from AIs (hmm). They expose a lot of engineering knowledge as an MCP (but get AI to create some of that knowledge). They are finding PR review times taking longer as a result and have added a bot to help ensure the simple one liner PRs get looked at quickly (we do this manually at work, sounds like a new process here)

Next #LDX3 talk is on platform engineering and how it's changing with AI agents and tools. Important takeaway in that for a particular org's platform the layer that sits on top of tools like Helm which encode your platform's governance and context is really the most important part of your platform for you, but agents will bypass that as they prefer to interact with your tools.

That layer needs to encode platform patterns you've decided for your organisation to enable scale (eg, prefer Postgres, means you can automate things like upgrades across the platform rather than manage each instance separately). AI risks undermining this by bypassing it as it knows less about this layer as it's org specific. If you're using infrastructure templates then agents are not careful about making decisions to vary them away from org norms because it doesn't know them. Basically, agents don't understand scope or boundaries!

"an incident post mortem is done when an incident is harder to repeat" and "AI is a tool but doesn't change the fundamentals" are definitely key things to internalise #LDX3

Okay I'm going to make a thread about my takeaways from talks at #LDX3. The first talk I'm in is interesting, it's on moving from technical to leadership and how to apply that to your team, but I'm self reflecting on it given my recent move (back) in to that space. I think I would really benefit from a mentor or some support in a leadership role right now as I have struggled a lot with this, especially given the wider organisational chaos going on that's made, and given cuts it definitely feels lonely at this level. The key takeaway I think is that when moving up, you need a peer group and support, and I'm not sure I've ever had that at both times I've moved onto leadership roles.

Watching people take low quality images of slides when the talk and slide deck is recorded and will be shared after the conference. 🤣

#ldx3 #ldx3london

Are any of my connections on #LDX3? Let's meet!

There's nothing sadder than a coffee station without coffee, except maybe a pastry stain without pastry. ☕🥐

#LDX3

On a train for a solo trip to #LDX3 #London. It's been a few years since I've had a chance to attend #LeadDev, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Is anyone I know here going (I know of a couple), or would any other solo attendees be up for making a new friend?

Alternatively, does anyone want to flag talks for me to attend? I already have my eye on "An anti-burnout framework for the Al era" and "Designing neuro-inclusive incident management".

https://leaddev.com/leaddev-london/agenda/

Anyone else going to #LDX3 next week?

How are devs at #AI startups and in Big Tech using AI tools, and what do they think of them? A broad overview of the state of play in tooling...

@gergelyorosz #LDX3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3_qN_Ynsk

Reflecting on an incredible experience speaking at @TheLeadDev's #LDX3 conference last week! Very grateful to have been accepted as a speaker and for the amazing support throughout.

I enjoyed discussing challenges growing teams in the era of layoffs, and hopeful that my talk can provide some inspiration by treating teaching as a core engineering skill, applying lessons from pedagogy. Slides here 👉🏻 https://speakerdeck.com/alismith/creating-the-next-generation-of-senior-engineers

#LeadDev #EngineeringLeadership

What stuck with me after two days at #LDX3 earlier this week?

★ AI isn’t a shortcut
★ Metrics need context
★ Leaders should build trust, not dashboards

Here are my 10 top takeaways:
https://sijobling.com/blog/10-takeaways-from-ldx3-2025/

Which one resonates most with you and your team right now?

#conference #techindustry #leadership

So many speakers at #LeadDev #LDX3 shared links to look into later, and I've found many more when I started following those up.

This post should be handy for me to keep track of them all, and for anyone else who might like to see if anything grabs them. Enjoy!

https://neil-vass.com/lots-of-links-from-leaddevs-ldx3/

When #LDX3 had a talk on why the performance curve (stack ranking) is bad i had to go see how advanced the thinking was. spoiler: not very.. but worthy nevertheless.

Why do employers do this practice that is inefficient and counter-productive? "FOMO" apparently. The sort of hand waving you have to reach for without a Marxist analysis of the pressure on employers to exploit labor. Still it was quite gratifying to see an engineering manager advocate for unionising.

Have been to several #LDX3 sessions focussed on staff engineers. Many feel isolated, but they're also pretty aligned. "lots of miro diagramming to help teams communicate" got the most vigorous nod of consensus from other staff engineers. Once again many spoke of responsibilities that seem likely to filter down to all engineers wrangling LLMs
- you can't know everything any more
- facts stop working. you need to sell what you want.
- identify the level at which you engage with problems

Surprisingly anti-work management software, anti-dashboards stance from this speaker from an outsourcing company at #LDX3 this morning. I wonder what the overlap is between LLM agent effective spend tools and employee surveillance tools.

There was a community round table of trans engineering managers and first I didn't know about it, then my brain needed to reboot and when I was able to communicate with coherence again, it was over :blobcatpensive: #LDX3

My 2nd workshop at #LDX3 was on technical leadership with @claresudbery (pretty sure i first saw her present at #AgileLondon 15+ years ago). It was a lot of confidence building around letting go of deep technical knowledge (in favour of broad knowledge) and why that is necessary for leadership positions. Arguably this shift is coming across the organisation. GenAI promotes superficial understanding of more subjects. How long before we're all asking, "But do i need to know why?" about everything.

Raccoons!!!!
#ldx3

I somewhat selfishly signed up for as many of the limited seat workshops at #LDX3 as I could. First up was "Mastering mentoring, managing and coaching" with Suzan Bond. Best takeaway was her advice to try and avoid ever asking "why?" in a 1:1. It elicits emotional responses. reframing as "what..."  is usually possible and often engages people more with the problem. for example, "What's the smallest change you could make that would help?" Still not an easy question, but less accusatory.

Comped a free ticket to "The LeadDev Conference" so expect a few #LDX3 tagged posts over the next two days. Kicking things off was @gergelyorosz of pragmatic engineer fame doing a "State of the GenAI" overview. A few takeaways,
- Google SREs are preparing for a 10x increase in code output from their devs
- Generally devs are only reporting 4-5hrs saved per week. Interesting mis-match.
- Claude Code has a very large fanbase given it launched a month ago.

big up for the monzo pals on stage at #LDX3 #LeadDev ✨

i’ve been hibernating lately, but am at #LDX3 today, so if any pals are here pls come say hi! 👋🏼