I attended The Principal Dev masterclass and I was left inspired. What a masterclass by Eduard Sizov!

Here, I will share a short recap on the two days of the masterclass, if you will ever be in doubt of attending one.

Setup

There are two days and two separate “stages”, one dedicated to technical nature of software engineering (Technical), and one for the “soft skills” part (Human).

The masterclass is remote, with the concept of presentation by the host, Eduard. Eduard with the participants goes over the slides of the presentation, talking about different topics, asking for opinions, ideas, sharing thought-provoking stories, giving advices. After each smaller section, participants are divided into smaller groups of ~10, where they can discuss about the previous topic, share their own experience more directly with others. This was really valuable because you can see how other engineers, from all over the world, work at their respective companies, basically how they form the work culture around specific topics.

Day 1 - Technical

We were introduced with some technical challenges that we ought to face at some point. Then we had a lot of discussions about them.

The quote that lives rent free in my head:

Customer doesn’t need a software, they need cost-effective solutions to their problems

Some of the other topics were:

• CBA - Cost Benefit Analysis - the process of finding the cost-effective solution from a list of alternatives.
• How to be a better leader - talked about high leverage activities, Pareto principle
• How to measure IT performance - Lead time, Defects, Due Date Performance, Reliability, ROI, Satisfaction
• Ways to increase throughput
• Technical debt

Day 2 - Human

Day 2 was also very inspiring, as this kind of topic often gets overlooked in software engineering world, but it is so important.

Topics that we discussed varied from:

• Mentoring and mentor’s toolbox
• Learning
• Bus factor
• High-performance teams
• Retention - more important than hiring
• Recruiting

Conclusion

Definitely worth attending. Fast-paced, thought-provoking and inspiring two days of The Principal Developer Masterclass.

The only downside I would say is that masterclass is only 2 days :) , and the tempo is somewhat fast, a lot of new stuff and ideas to process really quickly.

What is great is that I actually use this knowledge everyday since, I try to apply it whenever I can, especially the soft skills part.