Adi 🐕🐾🐾🐾 (he/him)AI/Gemini appears to struggle to accept that people over 30-35 work in tech.
A speaker's slides are all Gemini generated images. None of the tech workers appear to be above 35.
Chris NorthwoodThe next talk #LDX3 is how to stop engineering principles/culture failing under pressure. If you set up a culture, define it, get buy in, but the environment doesn't support it, then the culture will fail and bend according to what the environment demands of it. A culture needs intention and the environment needs to make adhering to those principles easy by removing barriers to do so and putting guardrails to stop going onto well worn but negative paths. It might also be the behaviours in the culture you want to build aren't effective at producing the outcomes you want so you need to review if the behaviours in your culture are working.
For seniors there is less impact of AI because coding is a smaller part of the job, but juniors using AI doesn't slow them down despite more PRs from juniors. It is important to encode your engineering standards into your AI tools to match your internal standards. #LDX3
Okay now more AI stuff #LDX3. Looking at the impact of AI on juniors which is a topic of interest to me. Very interesting from Wise who still have a proper grad scheme and development pipeline. That seems rare nowadays but so important! (It's how I got into this industry). It does now include using AIs and agents as standard and insteads refocuses skills on how to review code rather than craft it (but AI skills are used to assist this, also things like fixing broken CI). They estimate onboarding is now half the time (time to 10 PRs) and are creating twice as many PRs. A lot of focus on taking time away from seniors and have them learn more from AIs (hmm). They expose a lot of engineering knowledge as an MCP (but get AI to create some of that knowledge). They are finding PR review times taking longer as a result and have added a bot to help ensure the simple one liner PRs get looked at quickly (we do this manually at work, sounds like a new process here)
Next #LDX3 talk is on platform engineering and how it's changing with AI agents and tools. Important takeaway in that for a particular org's platform the layer that sits on top of tools like Helm which encode your platform's governance and context is really the most important part of your platform for you, but agents will bypass that as they prefer to interact with your tools.
That layer needs to encode platform patterns you've decided for your organisation to enable scale (eg, prefer Postgres, means you can automate things like upgrades across the platform rather than manage each instance separately). AI risks undermining this by bypassing it as it knows less about this layer as it's org specific. If you're using infrastructure templates then agents are not careful about making decisions to vary them away from org norms because it doesn't know them. Basically, agents don't understand scope or boundaries!
"an incident post mortem is done when an incident is harder to repeat" and "AI is a tool but doesn't change the fundamentals" are definitely key things to internalise #LDX3
Mez 
Day two #ldx3london #ldx3 all about career and leadership. Hopefully fewer sales pitches.
Okay I'm going to make a thread about my takeaways from talks at #LDX3. The first talk I'm in is interesting, it's on moving from technical to leadership and how to apply that to your team, but I'm self reflecting on it given my recent move (back) in to that space. I think I would really benefit from a mentor or some support in a leadership role right now as I have struggled a lot with this, especially given the wider organisational chaos going on that's made, and given cuts it definitely feels lonely at this level. The key takeaway I think is that when moving up, you need a peer group and support, and I'm not sure I've ever had that at both times I've moved onto leadership roles.
Watching people take low quality images of slides when the talk and slide deck is recorded and will be shared after the conference. 🤣
Rust Saiargaliev