Skip to main content

So you think you can lead a team?

By

What: So you think you can lead a team?

When: 27th & 28th February 2025

Where: nor(DEV):con, The Kings Centre, 63-75 King St, Norwich, NR1 1PH

More Info: https://nordevcon.com/

Get tickets: https://ti.to/norfolkdevelopers/nordevcon-25

Software engineering is hard. Leading a team, as an engineer, can be even harder. Many of us are better at developing software than we are with people and feel our value lies in actually writing code. When you step into team leading, there are more people than code and your value increases.

Over the last 25 years I’ve been unexpectedly dropped into team leading a number of times, but three and a half years ago I chose to do it. It took at least twelve months for me to realise I was only starting to understand what leading a software team is and what it means.

Join me for some of the highs and lows of team leading and an insight into some of the things I learnt to help me be a better team lead. I can’t promise a panacea as I  still have much to learn, but I hope to help you avoid some of the mistakes I made.


Profile

Husband, father, software engineer, metaller, Paul has been writing software for over 35 years and professionally for more than 20. In that time he has worked for and in all sorts of companies from two man startups to world famous investment banks and insurance companies. He has built and run three limited companies, none of which made him a millionaire and two of which threatened his sanity on more than one occasion.

Paul was a founding member of both SyncNorwich and Norfolk Developers, two of the most successful tech and startup based community groups in the East. He created and chaired the hugely successful Norfolk Developers Conference (nor(DEV):con) for seven years bringing in speakers and delegates in the sphere of software engineering from around the globe.

Paul is currently a Senior Team Lead at Haven (yes, the holiday people). He loathes the word Entrepreneur, not least because he struggles to spell it and it reminds him of Del Boy from the 80s sitcom Only Fools and Horses. He sees Entrepreneurship as a side effect of the creative process of problem solving, rather than a career path in its own right.

Despite having dealt with the world of business from directors of the board down, Paul has kept both feet firmly on the ground even when his head has been in the clouds with healthy doses of Heavy Metal, Science Fiction and Formula One and long hair until it started falling out in 2013.

Oh, and he loves good tea too!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
Post a Comment
Read more