Sally Lait - blog

In my career I’ve seen a wide range of what could generically be considered “challenging times”: layoffs, a pandemic, complete C-suite overhauls, political instability and wars, reorgs and strategic U-turns, and more.

Another year has come to an end, and I’m back with my lengthy annual reflections.

After the first iteration at LeadDev last year, I was thrilled to be invited back as one of the co-facilitators of the "Connecting Leaders with Disabilities" community representation group (CRG) at this year's LDX3 event.

This chain letter-esque post has been doing the rounds, and in the spirit of trying to rebuild my blogging muscle I thought what better to blog about than blogging?

A hugely belated ‘end of year’ post, but it’s here finally!

Despite growing up as a third culture kid used to travel, and having spent almost 20 years visiting various places around Japan, this spring brought a new experience: taking my kid on their first international holiday.

My annual, lengthy, round-up tradition continues into another year. 2023 brought a return to Japan, a return to work, a lot of fatigue and health challenges to navigate, but also a lot of lovely memories.

My job hunt experience this time around was very different to previous rounds.

During my latest job search, I’ve found myself wishing I’d kept more detailed notes on situations encountered in previous roles.

It’s time for another annual roundup, but this one’s been a notably very different year.

I was recently invited to be on Skiller Whale's Primarily Context-Based podcast to talk about the topic of how technology can influence business decisions.

I’m not going to bury the lede… I’m making some life changes and am looking for a new role in 2023, and I’d love your help to find it!

After a very long, pandemic-tastic gap, I’m back with an update on my Japanese learning adventures.

According to the dConstruct archive, the previous iteration of the conference was in 2015. 2015!

Earlier this year I had a big life moment: I had a child.

A recent tweet by Will Larson around developer productivity surveys caught my eye, as this is an area I find really interesting.

When it comes to career advice, a common recommendation is you’ll need to work on your leadership to become more senior.

Another pandemic-tactic yearly round-up!

Earlier today I saw a tweet from Jo Franchetti, asking what advice you'd give your junior developer self.

One of the hardest things about being in a leadership position is understanding that you’re so visible, and your actions or behaviour — whether intentional or not — can send ripples through a large sphere of influence.

When it comes to looking after ourselves, sometimes we need to make sure we're practicing self care at the appropriate level.

I’ve written some form of annual summary most years since 2011, and every year I read them back.

I’ve been involved in a couple of progression frameworks.

Starting a new management relationship can be a turbulent time on both sides, and we want to do our best to minimise disruption as much as possible.

During my search for a new role, I kept a list of questions to use during the process.

“What should I learn?

As you may have seen from a few mentions, I'm soon going to be starting a new role.

Throughout September I’m going to be holding some free coaching sessions aimed at supporting folks from groups that are under-represented in the tech industry.

When you think about “scaling” in the context of engineering, does your mind jump to thinking about systems, or about growing your organisation?

In this post I talk about flipping around a common management tactic – the PIP – to help people move through periods where they’re feeling unhappy at work PIPs, or Performance Improvement Plans, are a topic that come up frequently when talking about manag…

I’ve recently had conversations with some engineers who want to know more about what my day-to-day looks like, and what my path has been to get here.

We’re collectively living through a very strange time at the moment.

I’ve been reflecting on the last year and a bit of working back in engineering management, and have a few posts that I’d like to share.

Happy new year!

It's not often that I hear about an emerging web standard and I find my mind wandering back to it over the next few days, but Web Monetization has done just that.

Life as a manager means that I go to a lot of meetings.

Since joining Monzo as an engineering manager at the start of December I've experienced a huge amount.

Since returning to employee status I've been thrown back into having an absolutely stacked calendar.

This week I received the very happy news that I'd passed my second Japanese exam - the JLPT (otherwise known as 日本語能力試験) at level N4.

I really enjoy this time of year.

I’m so excited to announce that I’m soon going to be starting the next chapter in my professional life.

Most of the work that I do can be boiled down to trying to help people make better things with the web, in better ways.

The other day I saw a call on social media from the lovely Jo Franchetti, asking for people’s views on web permissions to take into a W3C workshop.

Since the beginning of this year I've been taking my Japanese learning a lot more seriously.

This is the second post in a two-part series, capturing my latest trip over to Japan.

In January I headed back to Japan, jumping on the opportunity to spend more time in a country that I love.

Another end of a year means another time to look back, but also to look forward.

In this post I'll talk about the process I went through when starting to explore the strange and wonderful world of recurrent neural networks It all started with Dan Hon.

I wrote recently about how we’re working towards redesigning and redeveloping the OpenActive website (our redesign/development tender is currently open).

We’ve started the process of redesigning and redeveloping the OpenActive website, and as part of trying to do this openly we’d like to ask for your initial thoughts.