At the beginning of November, Berlin welcomed the LeadDev community for the annual 3-day event, which is a blend of hands-on workshops, a community meet-up and 2 days packed conference schedule with insightful talks.
LeadDev events are the place to be for software engineers and engineering managers who want to level up in their roles by building technical capabilities and leadership skills and who create high-performing teams.
This year, Netcetera was at LeadDev front and centre! As an industry partner, we hosted the pre-conference meet-up, and we presented ourselves at the conference too.
The event kicked off on Wednesday, 2nd November, with a series of workshops and masterclasses. On that same evening, we invited the community to our home base in Berlin, Spielfeld Digital Hub, for the pre-conference meet-up.
Together with 40 industry experts, we enjoyed a very nice evening in a good atmosphere, with an inspiring program and engaging networking.
Our own Makedonka Stamatova opened the program, sharing insights of who Netcetera is and what connected us to LeadDev, followed by a talk by our senior software engineer, Blagoj Jovanov, who highlighted very important aspects of Lead Dev responsibilities - delegating ownership, a topic which sparked much interest. We also learnt a lot about how to navigate the chaos of scaling and how to make the digital world more accessible.
The next day, the event moved to the beautiful Berlin Congress Center where 1000 attendees from all around the world came together. Our Netcetera team presented the company at our prominent booth in the exhibitor area. Lots of attendees passed by the booth and showed a lot of curiosity and engagement in who we are and what we do, which resulted in some pleasant chats.
Impressions
We had a great time hosting and participating and gained a lot from the event. Here are some impressions from our team:
I have been following the LeadDev events for a long time and contributed individually to the community, and I was excited to finally get so close to the community and was honoured to welcome them to our own office! I met amazing people and bumped into a few old friends. I got plenty of learnings! Thank you, LeadDev, for enabling that all for us! Thanks, Netcetera for supporting the partnership!
Even though the conference days were long, they went by so quickly thanks to the exciting exchanges with the diverse pool of participants. The inviting and relaxing atmosphere made it easy to connect with each other.
Although LeadDev was a conference and not a standard company presentation or job fair, we had a lot of people coming to our stand asking to know more about who we are and what we do. All in all, it was a great experience since we had the opportunity to meet not only potential colleagues but also partners and clients.
My key takeaways from the talks- other companies are leaning towards a user-centred approach, and the technical part comes after. The focus of leading should always be on people, but also, processes and operations shouldn’t be neglected. “Strategic leadership is about your habits: the way you think and spend your time is the kind of leader you are,” as Lena Reinhard said in her talk.
