3 Takeaways From My First International Tech Conference
Greetings from Budapest, Hungary 🇭🇺.
For their 10-year anniversary edition, Craft Conference kindly invited me to speak about one of my favorite topics: “Beyond Coding: IC leadership is here to stay” aka leadership without titles, at all levels.
Besides the speaking part, I was also able to connect with other speakers, attend some of their talks, and tourist around Budapest.
Keep reading if you want to see my main takeaways from this conference and my time here.
⭐️ Exciting announcement ⭐️
I am thrilled to share that my “Impact through Influence in Engineering Teams” course has been recognized as a top 100 Maven course in Leadership & Career with a 4.9/5 rating. As part of the Maven 100 celebration, we’re offering a special surprise: use code MAVEN100 to get 25% off (offer ends Sunday, June 9th at 10 PM EST). My next cohort kicks off on June 18th.
Behind the scenes of my talk
Leadership without titles, at all levels is a topic not new to those reading this newsletter for a while, and I was so excited to bring it to a new audience.
My talk was an expanded version of a LinkedIn live event & article collab I did with
back in December. If you’re curious, check it out here.How I structured my talk
Similar to my courses, I like to start my talks with a story, followed by the actual material broken down into 3 parts.
The story I picked was my first exposure to leadership, back when I was at Google and what I experienced during my first leadership training. It was aimed to be a real-life illustration of the concepts I was going to tackle next:
Understanding leadership - myths vs realities
Why we need to embrace a leadership mindset at individual contributor levels
What makes a good IC leader - 6 skills to master
The recording will be published soon, so I’ll make sure to update you when it’s available.
A final note if you’re considering public speaking
Be prepared for things to go wrong. In my case, my Canva slides weren’t showing properly so I had to convert them to PPT, which messed up all the fonts and alignment. So I spent the last 30 minutes before my talk fixing all my slides.
The energy of like-minded people is infectious
Since I left my previous job back in July 2023 to work for myself, I terribly missed the energy of a group and being surrounded by so many smart and passionate people. The concentration of passion for various aspects of technology was at another level at Craft.
I got the chance to connect with so many amazing speakers. From book authors, consultants, CTOs, architects, engineers, programming language creators, and many more, I had something to learn from each person I spoke with.
Here are some of my favorites:
- , author of : Gergely and I are friends and he’s an awesome person; it was great catching up and talking about all things Tech and writing
Richard Feldman - inventor of the Roc programming language and author of Elm in Action book
his talk was about avoiding escape hatches, but what I enjoyed most was chatting about how he built the Roc compiler
Richard has a podcast you can find here
Conor Hoekstra - programming languages aficionado working for NVIDIA, we sparred over why go is a great programming language
Conor loves talking about C++ and functional programming and hosts a YouTube channel called Code Report
Joseph Pelrine - one of the pioneers of Agile, we had a very interesting conversation about psychological safety and measuring high-performance
Gregor Hohpe - his talk “Build abstractions, not illusions” made me realize how much I actually miss architecting distributed systems
Conferences are a great way to stay up to date with trends
Due to my horrible jet lag and needing to prepare for my talk, I couldn’t attend as many talks as I would’ve liked. I’m looking forward to watching them online when they’re available.
From the talks that I did attend, here are some of the trends that I noticed:
The impact of AI on the software engineering profession
Other AI-related topics — I attended an interesting talk about vector databases and Apache Cassandra
People starting to acknowledge Agile or Scrum isn’t all that (no shade to those who do like Agile or do Agile training for a living)
Working with legacy code — this was particularly interesting to me, as I’ve been exposed to old code, but always felt anxious to make any changes
Outro
As I’m making the final changes to this article, I’m about to embark on the next and final leg of my trip: Bucharest, Romania where I’ll be visiting my family. Next week I’m heading back to San Francisco to teach the 4th cohort of my course “Impact through Influence”.
It’s not yet 100% confirmed, but the next conference I’m speaking at is most likely LeadDev Berlin in November. If you’re thinking of attending, let me know!
Until next time,
The Caring Techie
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It was a great talk, thanks Irina! It's especially timely considering the current job market. Mastering these leadership skills can make or break a promotion or job interview.
Wish I was there for the talk, Irina! Thanks for sharing this story with us and I know the folks in Budapest learned a ton