LDX3 2025 Highlights: Leadership, Team Growth and AI

LDX3 was the first edition of this conference by LeadDev: an organization dedicated to events for leadership in IT. This was also my first conference on LeadDev now that I have established some seniority as a technical manager over multiple years and projects. It was a super interesting event to me, as I had the chance to both listen to and chat with people who face the same challenges, but also see the same positive results of using different methods across different teams.

A Promising First Edition

Overall, the event organization was very dynamic. For a first edition, the talks were well structured. Talk rooms were ample and had (mostly) enough seats for the interest, but being fully booked, there were obviously some interesting talks which I was unable to attend. On the second day (and I guess on a great show of proactiveness by the organisers), the more packed talks started being broadcast in the external hall with headphones for those who wanted to listen made available. Two gold stars!

About the talks themselves, obviously there was a big focus on AI, but I also enjoyed some of the short talks about mentoring/onboarding both new senior devs on existing teams, junior devs and also just getting everyone on the same page through learning/teaching mechanisms that actually work long-term. On AI, I enjoyed a talk about integrating ML workflows using MCP to streamline AI Agents, and also how AI is helping (and not!) technical writers (a task lot of us technical leads end up having to carry out). There was also a very interesting talk on AI coding assistants. From the established Cursor and Windsurf, to Microsoft’s revamped (and still messy) Copilot - the later one which is of particular interest to me and many, since several companies also share the need of keeping their code and IP private and safe, a common topic across the AI talks.

Looking Ahead

I really enjoyed these two days, and hope to attend more LeadDev conferences and would love to be there for LDX3's second edition. Let’s just hope London is a bit rainier next time, because 28°C there feels like 35°C back home in Portugal!