Speaking Engagements
Invite Andrew to speak at your next event. His 20+years of industry experience allows him to share his insights, connect with the audience, and get everyone thinking and inspired.
# Speaking
# Speaking
Andrew spent 20+ years in tech, starting as a developer and working his way to CTO. Along the way he discovered that being great at code doesn't make you great at leading people, and nobody tells you that until you get promoted. Andrew shares his thoughts, lessons and advice on building happier and healthier teams on-stage. He’s available for in-person and remote keynotes, conferences and events.
If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem, you have bigger problems.
AI can write code faster than you. But if speed of production is what's holding your team back, you have much bigger problems. The bottleneck was almost the coding, it was the three-week chats about what to build, the requirements that changed after you shipped, and the decisions nobody wanted to own. If your strategy is "write code faster” in the world of AI you're optimising the wrong thing. Let's talk about what to optimise instead.
The five stages of losing our craft
Every engineer on your team is in a different place with AI right now. Some are resisting it entirely. Some are quietly using it but won't admit how much. Others are deep in trial and error, slowly realising their role is about to shift in ways no one prepared them for.
This talk maps the five stages playing out across engineering teams, from denial through to an acceptance, and gives leaders a practical framework for meeting people where they are and helping them move forward.
Embrace the suck: the part of leadership nobody warned you about
You were great at writing code. Then someone decided your reward for being good at your job was to do less of it.
This talk covers the specific moments in the engineer-to-leader transition where most people really struggle - the identity crisis, context switching and new responsibilities you have to figure out.
I'll share what's actually happening, why your instinct to retreat to your IDE will make it worse, and what to do instead.
Debugging Difficult Conversations — Or "How not to chicken out"
Over 80% of programmers found that learning to handle Difficult Conversations lead to finding better solutions to theirs problems.
This talk will teach you:
- What Difficult Conversations are and what happens when you ignore them
- Why having Difficult Conversations can be beneficial to you, your team, and your career
- A framework to help you prepare for Difficult Conversations
