Gearing up for LeadDev London 2023!

We're buzzing with excitement as we prepare for a return to LeadDev here in London. Not only are we sponsoring the event (and the real-time captioning) but two of our team (Alicia and Lisa) are speaking this year!

The growth trajectory of LeadDev has been a sight to behold. It’s really upped its game over the years and become a melting pot for new and experienced managers, leads and other folks wrestling with similar challenges. I've personally attended as a technical lead, then later when transitioning to the role of a manager and now am here years later as the co-founder and CTO at incident.io.

I often looked at the main stage and the sponsor booths, and thought that one day it’d be really cool to come back and sponsor the event and last year, that’s exactly what we did!

Rather fittingly, we had an incident of our own last year, accidentally printing hundreds of t-shirts in the wrong colours. They arrived the day before, far too late to do anything about it, and it was arguably slightly poetic, given the nature of our business. Luckily they flew off the shelves anyway — the “Don’t Panic” sentiment was clearly one that resonated!

To top it off, Lisa, one of our Technical Leads, did an amazing talk on using incidents to level up teams to a jam-packed audience and the response was exceptional. You could feel people hanging off her words and there were some really excellent conversations afterwards, both of which were a real testament to the effort she put into it.

I remember Chris (co-founder and CPO) and I saying just how real it made our early-stage company feel to be back at this conference as founders, with our newly formed engineering team chatting to attendees, Lisa up there killing it on stage and our logo in the background.

A meaningful moment for me personally as a founder, and one I won’t forget.

This year, we’re back! This time with correctly printed t-shirts (and all sorts of other goodies to boot) and not one but two members of our team on stage.

Alicia is one of our Engineering managers and will be doing a talk on how to drive pace in your team and Lisa will be talking about building sustainable on-call rotas, both things we really care about here.

Enthusiasm for the event isn’t limited to myself, Alicia and Lisa though. Almost the entire incident.io engineering team will be attending either LeadDev or StaffPlus this year. I did a quick poll and for 6 of us, it’ll be their first time attending and the rest of us have collectively been to LeadDev more than 22 times!

I also polled the team on which talks everyone was most looking forward to, and while there was a broad range (it's a great lineup), some of the highlights included:

• The 9.1 Magnitude Meltdown at Fukushima | Nickolas Means
  • This piqued the interest of several folks in the team, myself included. I love Nick and his speaking style and his talks are always fantastically communicated and lovely end to the first day.
• Maximizing your impact when context-switching | Maude Lemaire
  • This generated quite the buzz here, since it’s something we do a lot in our team. “It comes with the territory when working at pace, and if there's even just one small good takeaway from this, then it'll pay dividends for years to come” - I agree!
• Running large scale migrations continuously | Suhail Patel
  • I’ve personally worked with Suhail at Monzo, so I can confidently say you should definitely, definitely go to this one — he knows what he’s talking about! Migrations are something our team spend a lot of time thinking about and we’ve even written about them ourselves.
• Solving the puzzle of staff+ time management | Blanca Garcia Gil and Scaling your influence when you can only be in one place at once | Michael Tweed
  • These also came up as high on peoples’ lists. We’re growing rapidly and that naturally means that the team we have are stretched thin and we need to find ways to multiply influence and impact. “Being in one place at a time is important - fractional me isn't very useful to anyone, but also limiting, so like...how do you square that circle”.

We can’t wait to hear these talks and hang out with everyone in person, so come and say hi! We’ve grown a lot as a team since last year, our brand colour is bright orange (we call it Alarmalade) and most of our stuff has “Don’t Panic” written on it in big letters, so we’re kind of hard to miss…

We’ll see you there ❤️ 👋