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AI-generated abandonware is hollowing out open source
When everyone can build, the scarce resource becomes maintainers.
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Demand for engineering managers is surging in the agentic coding era
Just not necessarily to be managers…
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Think the technical interview is dead? Think again
The technical interview is evolving as AI-assisted coding becomes the norm.
Editor’s picks
What is an engineering manager? Taking the step up
This fulfilling role takes you a step beyond a lead engineer. Find out how to best showcase your skills to land it.
New York • September 8 & 9, 2027
Loved LDX3 New York? Pre-sale tickets for 2027 are now available.
Essential reading
On our Engineering Manager playlist
The Manager’s Path: Camille Fournier in conversation
A guide for tech leaders navigating growth and change.
Things I got wrong when preparing for my first Engineering Manager role
Ferit Topcu shares his own experiences in this transition, the errors I made, and how I overcame them.
What we talk about when we talk about leadership
Exploring key leadership themes from years in tech, this talk offers guidance and practical strategies to help engineers become the leaders they want to be.
On-call revolution: Building a culture of ownership and collaboration
Discover how innovative on-call rotations empower developers, foster team collaboration, and reduce complexity, creating a cohesive, ownership-driven culture that enhances service quality.
Managing authentically across levels
Learn how to manage engineers at all levels with practical tips for adapting your style to support growth and foster a thriving, high-performing engineering team.
The festival for modern engineering leadership
New York • September 15 & 16, 2026
More for Engineering managers
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Bugs, outages, and lessons from LDX3 2025
From outages to rebuilding trust, discover the top insights and real-world lessons from LeadDev’s LDX3 2025.
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Vibe coding, hype cycles, and why AI isn’t the 10x answer
How has AI impacted some of the cultural and technical aspects of software engineering?
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AI productivity gains are being offset by organizational bottlenecks
Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.
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The rise – and looming fall – of acceptance rate
It has become the de facto metric for measuring the effectiveness of AI coding assistants, but is it fit for purpose?
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How to communicate mandates (even if you disagree with them)
You may not agree with a mandate, but that shouldn’t affect the way you communicate it to your team.
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Speed without quality is tomorrow’s crisis arriving faster
At LeadDev LDX3 2025, Christine Pinto, CTO of Epic Test Quest, shares why chasing speed without quality leads to costly failures.
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Has manual testing become obsolete?
AI can improve a lot of processes – but where does testing and QA fit into the new landscape?
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How to hire force multipliers (not 10x engineers)
Long heralded as the “brilliant jerks” of tech, their damage can run deep when it comes to team culture. Hire a force multiplier instead.
Videos for Engineering managers
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Obsessing over AI is optional
This talk is for overwhelmed engineering leaders and senior ICs who feel quietly guilty about not experimenting with every AI trend.
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Startup made, enterprise grade: Earning trust, scoping tight, and shipping quality with a small team
Small teams are increasingly expected to build for enterprise-scale customers, and AI is changing how they get there. This talk explores how startups can ship enterprise-ready features with lean teams, what’s changed along the way, and how they’re adapting for what comes next.
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The continuous thunderdome
This talk takes Steve Yegge’s “continuous thunderdome” as a starting point and shows how to make CI/CD work at planet scale, and how to solve the perennial problem that nobody wants to fix the build.
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How we migrated from manual deploys to agent-driven development in under six months
This talk will dig into the technical and social details of Imprint’s migration to safely transition from manual deploys to continuous deployment with substantial agent-written PRs in under six months.
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From SDLC to AI-DLC: Changing how software is built
AI agents may be making code faster to write, but they’re also shifting the bottleneck further down the delivery process. This talk explores why proven practices like progressive rollout, observability, feature flags, and automated rollback are becoming essential for teams adopting AI at scale.
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The manager’s path in the age of AI
Which management skills AI is genuinely changing, which stay non-negotiable, and how to tell the difference.
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The state of AI in software development: Insights across 500+ organizations
In this talk, Justin Reock, Deputy CTO at DX, will share a data-driven “state of the union” on AI in engineering, grounded in both quantitative data from thousands of developers and on-the-ground observations.
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Tackling the junior developer crisis in the age of AI
How to keep AI in the workflow without losing the apprenticeship: three exercises that rebuild debugging, explanation, and critical thinking when polished output hides shallow understanding.
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Your Slack has a neurotypical bias
The communication habits that place disproportionate cognitive load on neurodivergent engineers, and a one-sprint audit with three specific rewrites you can deploy immediately.
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I thought my team knew what mattered
Why people don’t build connection to their work from what you say at all-hands, and how to translate what matters into something that sticks week to week.
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The 30 minute MBA for engineering leaders
The business fundamentals that help engineering leaders understand the financial and commercial forces that shape their work, and engage as partners rather than order-takers.
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Cold start crisis leadership
The specific leadership moves that work when you’re managing a crisis with no prior relationships, no system context, and a hard deadline, and why crisis leadership requires a different playbook entirely.