Tech Leads NW

How technical do technical leaders have to be? Are you worried that you’re too hands-on, or not hands-on enough? Are you exhausting yourself trying to keep up with every technical detail in your domain?

Sometimes individual contributors are promoted to leadership positions and worry that they won’t be as hands-on as they used to be.

Sometimes they worry that they no longer have time to stay up to date with modern technology and / or the state of their team’s code base(s).

Sometimes it’s the other way around: Somebody who has never been hands-on in the technical realm is given a leadership position, and worries they’re “not technical enough”.

Whatever your position, this workshop will help you to overcome your worries and figure out the best attitude and approach for you and your circumstances.

Takeaways
✅ How to embrace the difference between individual contributor and technical leader
✅ How to take a step back from “knowing all the things”
✅ How to make the most of the knowledge and experience of your team
✅ How to identify when technical knowledge matters, and when it doesn’t
✅ How to identify the things you need to know

About the Speaker:
Clare Sudbery is an independent technical coach with 25+ years of software engineering experience. She specialises in TDD, refactoring, pair programming, continuous integration and other eXtreme Programming (XP) practices.

Clare taught the Coding Black Females’ Return to Tech programme and co-ran Made Tech’s academy – coaching inexperienced engineers to learn on the job. She has a passion for helping under-represented groups to flourish in tech.

Clare hosted Season One of the acclaimed Making Tech Better podcast and publishes content on Medium (“A Woman in Technology”) and her own site (“In Simple Terms”). She is the author of the Stupidity Manifesto, has written about trunk-based development and refactoring for O’Reilly and for Martin Fowler’s site, and regularly presents workshops and keynotes at events all over the world.