Claude Code: Field Notes with Steve Cresswell

PLEASE NOTE: New Venue! Maids Head Hotel.

1830 - Arrive
1900 - Claude Code: Field Notes
1945 - Finish

Claude Code: Field Notes
Claude Code is changing the way many of us write software, but the experience is uneven. Some developers report dramatic gains in productivity, while others find it underwhelming and even dangerous. Much of the difference appears to come down to how the tools are used and how development workflows adapt around them.

In this talk I will share practical field notes from using Claude Code in day to day development. I will cover local setup, supporting tools, and the workflows that make the interaction with Claude productive rather than chaotic. I will also discuss how requirements and documentation influence outcomes, how to steer or constrain the model when necessary, and how these approaches begin to scale beyond an individual developer into team usage.

The landscape is moving quickly and there are undoubtedly people already doing more advanced things. The goal of this talk is simply to share current observations from the field, invite discussion, and compare notes on how developers are actually using these tools today.

Steve Cresswell
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephencresswell/

Stephen Cresswell is Head of Engineering at Haven, the UK’s largest holiday park operator, where he leads teams responsible for building and operating the digital systems that power the company’s sales and booking platforms.

He has over twenty five years’ experience in software engineering across sectors including utilities, insurance, media and education. His career spans roles from graduate developer to CTO and co-founder of the consultancy GuideSmiths, where he helped organisations modernise large systems and move legacy platforms to cloud-native architectures.

Stephen holds a first-class honours degree in Computer Science and an MBA from the Open University. Although now an engineering leader, he remains hands-on with software design and development and contributes to a number of open source projects, including several widely used Node.js libraries such as amqplib and Rascal.

Outside work he has been married for over twenty years. Together with his wife, he has two teenage children, and a minature poodle called Coco. In his spare time he enjoys functional fitness and 8-bit retro-gaming.