Ben Linders

As ClearBank grew, it faced the challenge of maintaining its innovative culture while integrating more structured processes to manage its expanding operations and ensure regulatory compliance. Within boundaries of accountability and responsibility, teams were given space to evolve their own areas, innovate a little, experiment, and continuously improve, to remain innovative.

Trouble seeing, pain, and stiffness are some of the things that can make it harder to program as you age. But there are solutions like changing fonts, using glasses, and rearranging the office layout. Some older programmers' mental concerns included a lack of motivation and cynical feelings. According to Gregory, exercising and getting good sleep help to keep the abilities needed as a developer.

DORA can help to drive sustainable change, depending on how it is used by teams and the way it is supported in a company. According to Carlo Beschi, getting good data for the DORA keys can be challenging. Teams can use DORA reports for continuous improvement by analysing the data and taking actions.

By focusing on the users, platform development teams can ensure that they build a platform that tackles the true needs of developers, Ana Petkovska said at QCon London. In her talk, Delight Your Developers with User-Centric Platforms & Practices, she shared what their Developer Experience (DevEx) group looks like and what products and services they provide.

As a software engineer or individual contributor, the next step in your career can be to become a principal engineer. The path to becoming a principal engineer at companies can feel unclear, which can inhibit individual engineering careers. But that also provides opportunities for engineers to invent and shape the role of principal engineers.

QA professionals are increasingly turning to AI to address the growing complexities of software testing. AI-driven automation can improve test coverage, reduce test cycle times, and enhance the accuracy of results, leading to faster software releases with higher quality.

According to Eivind Jahren, property-based testing is an invaluable tool for its ease of use and effectiveness. It is flexible in what requirements one can formulate and is simple and lightweight enough to put in the hands of software developers to perform iterative testing on a daily basis, less test code is required, and it’s easier to reuse test data generators for complex structured data.

As customers take on a more active role in national language adaptation, the process should be simple, using tools they are familiar with, Daniela Engert stated in her talk at NDC TechTown. They decided to use GetText in C++ where they provide tools and procedures for their customers to provide translations.

InnerSource helped reduce the amount of development work involved when introducing GitOps by sharing company-specific logic, Jemma Hussein Allen said at QCon London. She showed how they went from copy and paste deployments to full GitOps. She mentioned that a psychologically safe environment is really important for open and honest discussions that can help resolve pain points and drive innovation.

In her presentation at QCon San Francisco, Ying Dai shared two critical software engineering migration stories - one focused on production monitoring and the other on production deployments with automated validations. Both migrations were driven by the goal of enhancing engineering efficiency, but each came with its own challenges and lessons.