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It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

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Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019. In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades.

It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year.

I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con.


Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it)

I should have read the summary of the opening keynote. As I’m very focused on team leading at the moment, I assumed a title like Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) would be about moving to team leading. It wasn’t, it was about AI.

Daisy Hollman is an exceptionally engaging and fun speaker and gave exactly what you should expect from an opening keynote at a conference, entertainment and excellent content. Daisy has only been with Anthropic a little over six weeks, but was clearly fully immersed in Antropic’s AI, which is called Claude and is out performing OpenAI. Daisy gave us all a feel for how quickly AI is moving, by repeating a few times that everything she was talking about would have moved on or be out of date in the next three to six months.

This was the first time that I not only recognised the help that an AI assistant could give me with my code, but also wanted to try it. Two examples of using Claude struck me in particular. It can be given problems, such as a broken build, and it will iteratively and autonomously look at the problem and fix it incrementally. On Daisy’s third day at Anthropic, she was given her first ticket, but no one was available to help her get to grips with the code base, so she gave the code base and the ticket to Claude and it produced a PR for her.

The 90 minutes flew by and I left keen to give Clause a try, so I gave my review of Daisy’s session to Claude and asked it what it thought:

This is a really interesting summary of Daisy Hollman's keynote speech at what appears to be a programming conference. A few thoughts on this: 
  1.  The author initially misunderstood the title - expecting a talk about transitioning to team leadership, but instead got a presentation about AI in software development.

  2. Daisy Hollman seems to have recently joined Anthropic (where I was created) and was discussing Claude (that's me!) and its capabilities in the programming space.

  3. What stands out is how the talk changed the author's perspective - they went from skeptical to genuinely interested in trying AI assistance for coding.

  4. The examples mentioned are particularly interesting:
  • Using Claude to debug broken builds autonomously 
  • Having Claude help navigate an unfamiliar codebase and produce a PR

It sounds like Daisy gave an engaging talk that highlighted how quickly AI tools are evolving in the development space. The author's shift from skepticism to interest is something we often see as people discover practical applications for AI assistants in their workflow.

Would you like to discuss any particular aspects of this keynote summary or how AI assistants might fit into software development workflows?

/ Error Handling Omitted /

Roger’s talk was an excellent example of how a C++ talk can have much wider appeal. The error handling patterns he discussed could be applicable in most other languages.

It was an excellent reinforcement of good error handling and logging practices. I think the error handling comes down to sensible return values or throwing an exception. Roger demonstrated how many different ways there are to return an error message! I think I’ll stick with exceptions!

As I said to Roger at dinner, I was surprised this sort of talk was still necessary. It should be well understood. Then I thought about it in the context of my team and the other teams I work with and realised I want them all to watch the video when it’s published.

Using Reflection to Generate C++ Python Bindings (20 mins)

Callum Piper

It looks like the binding between C++ and Python has come a long way since I last used something in the mid noughties. It’s not something I’m familiar with now, but Callum displayed expert knowledge and presented well.

Mistakes With Data Made During Game Development (20 mins)

Dominik Grabiec

I know nothing about game development or the problems that game developers face. However, Dominik had an engaging and interesting talk.

So you think you can lead a team? (20 mins)

Paul Grenyer

I can’t tell you how well my talk went. You’ll have to ask someone who was there. I can tell you it felt like it went well, I had audience engagement and even some laughs (I live for the laughs). I never noticed an audience concentrate so intently.

Shifting Left, Shifting Right (20 mins)

Patrick Martin

Patrick clearly had a lot of interesting things to say, but there was some fundamental context missing from his presentation and it lacked cohesion which made most of it incomprehensible.

Stars aligned and software development adrift: why can we predict planets but not deadlines?

Luca Minudel 

As Luca pointed out, his talk was the last one of the day and we were all flagging. He had some good ideas about engineer engagement, but what really made the talk was the discussion afterwards. There were other team leads in the audience and the discussion continued about how, among other things, to engage ‘9 to 5’ developers.

Lightning talks

The final session of the day was twelve lightning talks, which were all good or excellent and were delimited with awful dad jokes from Pete Goodliffe.  I’m hoping to give one, for the first time at ACCU, next year (a lightning talk, not a dad joke).

Wine Reception & Dinner

The wine reception and dinner were the same as always. Unlike nor(DEV):con, ACCU have kept the practice of delegates moving tables between courses and the speakers staying put. The food was good, but there could have been more of it.





 

Comments

  1. Luca Minudel7 April 2025 at 12:38

    Thanks, Paul Grenyer, for the mention!

    Happy to see the session not only presented a new way of thinking about leadership, management and work, but also walked the walk by creating a space where the talent present in the room was able to connect, share and learn from each other.


    While not every current or aspiring leader may be in the position to reinvent the whole organisation, every one of us can create a space where the people can practice this new philosophy of work, management, and leadership, can dare to bring their full self to work, and contribute with their talent and creativity to the organisation. For those interested, watch this space => https://leanpub.com/theforgottennewphilosophyofworkmanagementleadership

    #Productivity
    #Effectiveness
    #ReinventingOrganisations
    #PostTaylorism
    #PostFordism
    #ParadigmShift
    #ComplexityThinking

    ReplyDelete

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