Andrea Magnorsky - The Making of a Decision
How many times have important decisions gone exactly like you expected?
Symptoms, not everyone will agree on what the problem is
Knowledge → Power in decision making
Types of power:
- Power-with: doing things
- Power-over: making others
Sources of power: authority, charisma, access to knowledge
Knowledge transfer very important. Not everyone knows everything (duh). Leaders need to be informed
Check out event storming https://eventstorming.co
Check out Influence Mapping
Prakriti Mateti - One does not simply rebuild a product
A rebuild is never finished, only started
Is there a point where tech debt is just noise and actually the project is too convoluted?
Do groundwork without asking for permission!!
Check out Opportunity Radar
Slow now to be fast later. A productive team is earnt not demanded.
Estimating at the right time
Metrics and delivering value during rebuilds
DX is a metric, needs more focus
Saying “no” to higher up execs. Disagreeing with execs. Etc. how to resolve tension.
Be bold. A timid plan won’t get anyone on board
Assume things will go wrong, even at the very end
Migrations take time!! Consider the environmental differences between start and end of the migration vs first customers to be migrated and last.
Question time with both speakers:
Engage with your execs. Build empathy and trust so you can protect your people. Management is up and down.
Storytelling internally and externally is what drives this
Customers can understand needing to wait sometimes
Focus on the why when needing to convince others.
When you don’t harness your power, somebody else will take it and may end up doing something you don’t want. Power can be used for good to elevate those less fortunate etc.
Empathy. If you don’t understand others then the world is passing you by. Jacinta Ardern closing remarks at university (Yale?) “empathy never started a war”
You have power over people, even if it’s not your role, even if you don’t want it. Sometimes you need to assert. Sometimes you need to seek dissenting views intentionally (asking for opposing views won’t always get people to speak up, try 1:1 or meeting again later).
Asking good conversations. Curiosity and kindness.
Silence is violence
Side note: weird fixation on weakness/empathy/femininity. What’s going on with that. Is this really the main question in the dialogue right now?
Read the room, is lots of questions the right way to achieve the goal right now. There’s the world in theory and there’s the world we actually live in.
Final thoughts:
- Are you really the decision maker? Steer the ship
- If you’re not sure, find out who the real decision maker is. How do you make it clear that they are the decision maker and influence them? (Influence mapping)
- Context!!!! A key part of shaping a project is putting decisions in context. Use feedback as much as possible.
Sarah Taraporewalla - AI in software deliver and beyond
AI can be good at adding code. It can’t refactor or clean up complexity.
- What thinking is fundamental to my subject and should not be outsourced?
- What thinking is mechanical and can be outsourced to expedite learning?
- What is the best AI tool to use?
Side note: I hate how AI is distorting the discourse. Previous problems that used to just be seen as hard (ie, legacy code, reverse engineering) are now being seen as “impossible, but maybe AI can help!”
The future belongs to those who do things
I walked out of this one
Maia Miller - Maximising impact: The strategic role of tech leaders in leading accessibility efforts
Accessibility is “”too hard””
1/5 Australians have a disability
Convincing business argument avenues: increasing revenue, reducing cost, mitigating risk
Build a community of practice to get more engagement with things like accessibility
QA and design can both drive accessibility standards and adoption
Ignore the “big problems”/hardest problems of legacy code at first. Focus on new features, design system, processes
Accessibility focus areas
- Job roles
- Products/features/design system
- Training and awareness
- Processes
Accessibility needs to be included in reporting
Everybody wants to be on a winning team so use those metrics!
Make accessibility into something that we are achieving and winning.
Erwin van der Koogh - The State of Observability: How to align your telemetry to business outcomes
Check out Distributive Tracing (relating to logging etc in the context of microservices)
Another view on the convincing the business people: more revenue, reducing cost, protecting existing revenue (risk)
This talk was a sponsored spot and tough to sit through tbh
Questuon time with both speakers:
Types of disability: eyes, ears, mouth, hands, brain
Stephanie Eckles - Modern CSS for Web Apps and UIs
Moderncss.dev
Smolcss.dev
Visual:
- color-scheme light-dark()
- color-mix() - works on transparent as well!
- Subgrid - align elements across grid cells
- text-wrap: pretty
Functional:
- @layer useful to simplify hierarchy of styles
- Container queries, responsive to an elements size instead of the viewport for media queries
- Check out container query units
- :has()
- Popover!!!!!
- Anchor position https://anchor-tool.com
- Custom select 💅
- Check out @supports
Delightful:
- Entry animations: @starting-style display discreet. Zell Lieu article
- View transitions!!!!!
- Scroll driven animations: scroll progress, view progress
Check out interop 2025
Fershad Irani - Tech’s carbon footprint
Tech is responsible for 2-4% global carbon. We are bad!!!
We should use green energy whenever possible
Check out: green web foundation
Does your website run on a green host
Solutions:
- Run your compute at a time when there is more green energy available
- Run your compute in a place which has more green energy
Windows update is now carbon aware, slay
Apple clean energy charging
Branch magazine website which adapts based off of the kind of energy that you’re using at the time
Grid-aware websites have limited. Flash of unstyled website. Limited data.
GitHub project: grid-aware-websites
Solar aware cdn: Solar Protocol
Question time with both speakers:
“Paving the Cowpath” approach to standards development
Firefox power usage profiling
Check out the cas working group drafts on GitHub
Idea: green/grid aware web Wordpress plugin??