Latest
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Lessons learned launching an MCP server
Steps you can follow if you’re thinking about launching your own MCP server.
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What leaders get wrong about the latent cost of technical debt
Where do leaders go wrong with tackling tech debt?
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In partnership with Uplevel
Measure first, migrate later: Lessons from a 230% velocity boost
Matt Buckley, VP of Engineering at Avalara, shares how his team used data to modernize legacy deployment processes.
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In partnership with CircleCIMove faster without losing control
Overcome the false trade-off between control and agility by rethinking platform governance so that standards become speed multipliers, enabling developer flexibility while reducing risk.
Editor’s picks
October 15-17, 2025
New York is almost here. Book your spot today.
Essential reading
How to build an effective technical strategy
Building a tech strategy requires a lot of moving parts. Learn about what routes to take and whether decisions should be top-down.
On our Technical Direction playlist
Modernizing legacy systems: A technical strategy for evolving monoliths into modern architectures at HelloFresh
Gain insights into transforming legacy systems into scalable architectures, with practical strategies for balancing stability, managing technical debt, and enabling growth opportunities at HelloFresh.
Technical Vision vs. Technical Strategy: The difference and why it matters
Jonathan Maltz digs into the nuts and bolts of setting a successful technical strategy. Startin by talking about the difference between technical vision and technical strategy.
How to implement platform engineering at scale
In this webinar, we’ll hear from enterprise engineering leaders who’ve overcome cultural barriers and team silos, and successfully adopted platform engineering practices in their orgs.
Good technical debt
Jon Thornton discusses how this framework was used to rapidly build and ship Squarespace’s Email Campaigns product in less than 15 months. Along the way, you’ll get several practical guidelines for how tech debt can supercharge your technical investments.
Creating, defining, and refining an effective tech strategy
Having a defined tech strategy creates alignment and keeps everyone on the same page. So how can you ensure yours is most effective? Panelists Anna Shipman, Randy Shoup, Papanii Nene Okai, Nimisha Asthagiri and Anand Mariappan share their tips.
Agendas for New York events are live!
Lineup includes Addy Osmani, Kevin Goldsmith, Robin Bonatesta, and more…
New York • October 15 & 16, 2025
More about Technical Direction
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How business strategy can help to prioritize projects
As a staff+ engineer your company’s business strategy can be a great indicator as to which projects you need to prioritize over others.
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12 things to consider when assessing open source software
Open source has been gathering more and more traction. But consider some of the risks before taking a leap.
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Leading open-source teams in large organizations
You can nurture and grow a highly impactful open-source project in your organization by systematically building an excellent team, technology, and product.
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Whatever happened to Big Data?
In the world of AI, cloud services, and automation, the tools and expertise engineering managers need to mine large-scale data sets are changing, fast.
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What you need to know about Biden’s AI executive order
US President Joe Biden has announced a sweeping executive order covering artificial intelligence. Here’s everything you need to know about how the US government is looking to regulate the technology.
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How OpenAI fought off security threats and GPU shortages to scale ChatGPT
The rapid rise of ChatGPT exposed OpenAI to a myriad of scaling issues and security threats, leading to some unique mitigation approaches.
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Balancing build vs buy decisions in a post-boom world
The question of whether to build software in-house or rely on third-party vendors is more fraught than ever, as budgets come under scrutiny and internal teams get stretched after waves of layoffs.
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Building a cloud architecture that can scale to any challenge
By building a cloud architecture that could meet the complex needs of international expansion, Nubank has established a more robust and flexible cloud infrastructure.
Top Technical Direction videos
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Managing expectations: Lessons from making large-scale platform changes
Discover how Datadog managed the technical and human challenges of migrating 2000+ engineers to Kubernetes, emphasizing effective communication and understanding human behavior during change.
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Dates and deadlines…it’s complicated
Learn key communication habits that clarify dates and deadlines, build trust, and improve team cohesion—especially in distributed teams—while making deadlines a positive, motivating factor.
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Should we multi-cloud?
Is multi-cloud right for your organization? In this session, Tanu shares a decision-making framework and real examples to help you navigate this complex question.
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With great power comes great responsibility
Learn how today’s systems impact billions of lives and why engineers must prioritize failure safety. This talk explores driving this crucial shift in software engineering.
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Training machines to see scenic beauty
Join me as we uncover the methodology behind this research and discuss how we plan to use it to help people connect with beauty around them, wherever they are in the world.
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Uncover the invisible ceiling
This talk will put the spotlight on one of those biases which is the assumption that software engineering around making mobile apps is less complicated or has a smaller scale in comparison to backend or infra engineering.
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Chromosomes in the Cloud: Building a scalable genomic matching algorithm
In this case study, I will walk you through the technical journey of building Atlas – the first open-source, cloud-hosted, genetic matching algorithm – comparing the genetics of patients and donors, and returning a list of donors who could be a match for transplantation.
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IPv6 – did we just win
Look, ok, I’m burnt out too. After years of pushing IPv6, we are where we are. But – where is that?