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[Tech Leads] How technical do technical leaders have to be?
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Workshops for technical leaders, in London and Cornwall 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”. On Mon 16th and Tue 17th June 2025, I'll be running a workshop titled How to deal with the “technical” in “technical leadership” at LDX3 (the reboot of Lead Dev London), designed to help attendees overcome their worries and figure out the best attitude and approach for them and their circumstances. Then on Fri 4th July 2025, I'll be in Cornwall at Agile on the Beach, running a similar workshop but in game format - titled Technical Leaders for Humanity – the helpful card game - where participants will make snap decisions that will earn them points as well as laughs, but will then have an opportunity to explore those decisions in more detail. Takeaways from both workshops: These are both fantastic events - two of my annual favourites. LDX3 will be a huge gathering of technical leadership, and Agile on the Beach will have a boat party and a beach party! In Cornwall! What's not to love? And I can offer an exclusive 15% off the LDX3 ticket price with the discount code CLARE15. Book your tickets and secure a slot now at LDX3 or Agile on the Beach. Talk on Continuous Integration Or if you're at the other end of the country, why not come see me at BCS Edinburgh on the evening of Wed 7th May ’25 for my talk Continuous Integration - that's not what they meant? Revamping my Offerings In other news, I'm currently working on a revamp of my main offerings, and I'll be sharing updates in this newsletter. If you're interested in resources aimed at technical leaders and software engineers, or you're a fellow freelance interested in the techniques I'm using to reboot my career, or you just want to follow what I'm up to, keep an eye on this newsletter. |
Clare Sudbery
Don't miss my next post! Subscribe to my newsletter and learn about, um, whatever I happen to be writing about right now. It's an adventure.
My life has gone through a dramatic change in 2026: At the start of January, I started a new job. After four years of being a freelancer and my own boss, I'm now working full time as a principal developer for Autotrader, close to my home in Manchester (UK). Autotrader are a fabulous company and I'm loving it, but it's a very different way of living my life. I actually wrote this post around New Year, before I started the new job and while I was thinking about how to ensure my new start was a...
Matt Squire on stage at Manchester Tech Festival (This is the second post in a series of three, starting here - part 3 may not be published yet.) I was at the always-informative Manchester Tech Festival the other week, where I saw a great talk by Matt Squire, CTO of Fuzzy Labs, with the title "Are We the Last Programmers? AI and the Future of Code". I’ve started experimenting with using LLMs to help me build software, so I'm particularly interested in this topic. Matt covered several areas in...
I’ve started experimenting with using LLMs to help me build software. One of my background goals in life is to remove or reduce the labour-intensive tasks that hog my time. One way of doing this is to automate. I already have tons of little scripts that do things for me... but I've always found that I'm sloooow at creating those little tools and automations. By xkcd. Permanent link to this comic: https://xkcd.com/1205/ So, recently I've started getting LLMs to help me build stuff to simplify...