Skip to main content

London Tech Leaders Summit 2026

Image
By

When One Beyond invited me to take part in the London Tech Leaders Summit, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. What I definitely wasn’t expecting was a seven‑foot robot interrupting the opening welcome.

As the doors flung open, the robot ducked to fit through, marched to the side of the stage, interrupted the speaker, and proceeded to continue the welcome itself. It was initially a little unsettling, but to be fair, its jokes were better.

What followed was a full day of presentations, panels, roundtable discussions, and workshops. All were framed through a leadership lens and all centred on AI. I know what you’re thinking: not another AI conference. But this one really stood out.

Rather than theoretical hype, it was software leaders - many in similar roles to mine - openly sharing what they’ve learned from using AI, where it’s taken them, and how it’s shaping their organisations.

There were several highlights. Hywel Carver, CEO of Skiller Whale, made a particularly memorable point: AI will never replace me as it has no empathy. The panel discussions on AI slop, the Software Development Lifecycle, and the broader realities of using AI day‑to‑day were thoughtful and refreshingly honest. And Justin Reock deserves special recognition for pushing on despite Wi‑Fi issues preventing access to his slides.

I came away having learned a new term - flow state - and with a list of books to read. More importantly, I left with practical insights and renewed enthusiasm rather than fatigue.

It was a genuinely enjoyable and worthwhile day, and I hope I’ll be back again next year.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

By
  In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge.  When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...
3 comments
Read more