Monthly Roundup - March 2025

Oops. I did it again. It’s been 3 months since I last wrote something here. Time flies when you’re busy, and writing is an easy task to get the backseat.

I can’t complain, though; it’s been a perfect storm of being busy with client work, as well as being able to travel for holiday and conference speaking. I had my first proper holiday in over a year, spending some much-needed lovely days on a beach in Costa Rica.

While this is technically titled my March roundup, this post will also cover highlights from December, January, and February.

Work I’ve Done

• Let's start with talking about my online workshops:
  • In January, I repeated my Engineer Your Talks: Brainstorming Talk Ideas workshop and my Engineer Your Talks: Writing Talk Proposals workshop. I've split the latter into two 1-hour workshops, with a couple of days in between to allow people to take what they've learnt, put it into practice and bring it to the second session for feedback. The feedback on these workshops has been great: I've had several participants tell me that the talks they've come up with during them have gotten accepted to conferences this year! If you're interested in joining a future one, I'll be repeating these later in April, so keep an eye out for those workshops to go live!
  • I've still got plans to launch the 3rd and 4th of the series (Developing Your Talk Idea and Structuring Your Story) this year, so stay tuned! Sign up here if you want to get updated when new workshops go live.
• Another highlight of January was facilitating 3 days of workshops, games, unconference and coaching with the Product and Engineering teams at Planday in Copenhagen! It was great planning activities for their team in collaboration with the awesome Chris Charalambous.
  • Together, we designed:
    • Several game & improv sessions on how to work as a team
    • An unconference where participants got to shape the agenda on the spot
    • A Product and Engineering async retrospective
    • An idea pitching contest
  • We then ran parallel workshop sessions, each covering our own areas of expertise, like How to Brainstorm Talk Ideas and Asking Great Questions (from me) and How to Deliver Positive Change and How to Use LEGO Serious Play to distil ideas (from Chris). I loved how these sessions took a different approach from mine while still reinforcing similar ideas and values!
• In the past few months, I've been working with several other teams to create workshops to help their teams improve their communication and leadership skills. I've loved collaborating with team leads and managers to understand what the team needs or wants to learn and then to adapt my workshops based on the specific focus areas. Curious whether I can help your team? Feel free to reach out to me at melinda@seckington.com.
• I‘ve continued doing engineering management consulting work. The past few months have focused on setting up foundational initiatives to improve how tech teams work together, like creating 1:1 templates and guidance and coaching the team's managers. I've loved getting hands-on again with writing team documentation and exploring how team processes can be improved.
• In December, I joined Refactoring.fm as one of their coaches-in-residence, alongside Joel Chippindale. It's been great getting involved in this community and seeing how supportive everyone is. I've been regularly facilitating their monthly Mastermind sessions, where community members come together to discuss specific topics (like hiring or balancing roadmaps).
• I've also continued working with my speaker coaching clients on improving their talks, ranging from looking at their descriptions and proposals to practising their delivery and stage presence. In particular, I'm so excited that I got to be a speaker mentor for State of the Browser again this year and did several coaching sessions with Niya Dobazova, who smashed her first-ever conference talk!

Events I’ve Attended

December and January were fairly quiet in terms of events, but February and March all the more made up for it!

• I was the MC for another LeadDev London meetup on March 6th! We had another great line-up of speakers: Sarah Binney talked about leading like a 5-year-old, Roksolana Diachuk talked about leading through uncertainty, and Vahid Panjganj talked about multi-agent systems.
• Tech Ladies Dinner Roundtable (TLDR):
  • It's been so lovely seeing my dinner meetup group grow over the past few months! My aim was to bring more women in tech together (regardless of your role) and help folks connect, get to know each other and build a support network. Amazingly, we've now got about 130 members in the LinkedIn group and 70 members in the WhatsApp group! If you're interested in joining, hit reply on this email or DM me on LinkedIn.
  • Since my last roundup post, I organised 3 dinners: Heddon Yokocho in December, Emilia's Craft Pasta in January, and Caxton Grill in March. This last one took place after CTO Craft Con and was our biggest dinner yet, with 16 attendees!
  • I've been asked a few times what goes into organising these dinners, so I'm planning to write this up as a blog post soon! I'd love to know if you have specific questions about this. If you do, feel free to hit reply on this email!
• CTO Craft Con on March 10th-11th: I had a brilliant time at CTO Craft Con this year. This was my 3rd time attending, and with each one, the group of people I know who are attending just grows larger and larger. This time, I ended up skipping a few of the sessions mostly so I could catch up and chat with folks who I hadn't seen for a while!
  • My main musings from the talks I did see: the role of CTO (as well as other senior technical leadership roles) varies so much across the industry and we’re all trying to map out, categorise and understand what skills are needed. The “essential” leadership skills for a company depends on multiple factors: the size of the team, what the company priorities are, what context the company works in, and what skills are already in the team.
  • It all got me thinking about what my own strengths are, what I enjoy doing and how I can help teams with those things. I realise a lot of what I do is to train and bridge those skills that are missing with teams, like coaching, building out processes, making decisions and organising internal initiatives, but those teams also need to be aware which of those are skills they’re missing.
• WebDevCon/AppDevCon/Dutch PHP Conference on March 21st in Amsterdam: This was my first time attending and it was a lot of fun. While it's technically 3 conferences, they all take place at the same time in the same venue, and attendees mingle all together. It's huge, though, with 10 tracks happening at the same time.
  • I was so pleased I got to bring back my Disney Driven Development talk, for the first time in 10 years! While at its heart, it’s about the same Disney principles (the 5 Keys), most of the talk was brand new, focusing on what we can learn from building theme parks to creating great experiences for teams. I packed in so many stories and examples from how Disney designs their parks as well as examples of how teams build their engineering cultures. It was hard to trim this talk to just 45 minutes!
• This year’s State of the Browser last Saturday was brilliant! It’s one of my favourite conferences and every year, I look forward to attending. As a community run event, it’s always impressive to see what they’re able to do. The speaker lineup this year was fantastic, and I took something away from every talk (I'm hoping to share some of the videos here once they're live!).

Stories I’ve Explored

Stories are a huge part of how I approach talks and blog posts, so each month I'll highlight the fictional stories I've explored recently. Especially those that play around with some aspect of their storytelling.

I’m going to cheat here and only cover stories from December, January, and February, pushing the March ones into next month's April edition - just because there have been too many good stories that I want to talk about and couldn’t bear cutting any of them!

• Does anyone else feel like you need to read books set in winter during winter? I loved Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett. The banter and frustrations between the two main characters, the whimsical fairy inspired setting, and the cosy vibe of the small town, it all made this just a comforting read, especially during the winter months.
• Evil villains, trained dolphins and cats that are smarter than you? Sign me up. Starter Villain by John Scalzi was a fun, quick read with more than a couple laugh-out-loud moments.
• I chose the perfect time to read this book: I started it two days before New Year's and finished it two days after. The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso is set at a New Year's Party that gets stuck in a sort of Groundhog Day mixed with alternative realities. It's fascinating. I loved the concept of the time-twisty-alternate-realities, plus the main character is a sleep-deprived mum who just wanted to have a few hours away from her newborn.
• While I've watched the Studio Ghibli version of Howl's Moving Castle many times and read other books from Diana Wynne Jones, I had never actually read Howl's Moving Castle. It is a pretty surreal but fun read, and I've already got the sort of sequel lined up (same world, different characters).
• Another highlight of recent months was Buried Deep and Other Stories by Naomi Novak. This is an anthology with several stories based on Novak's previous series, as well as some new stand-alones. As with most anthologies, some stories I end up loving, others... not so much, but then seeing the reviews, those are exactly the ones that other people loved! My favourites here were Seven, Blessings (think the fairies bestowing blessings on Sleeping Beauty), Dragons & Decorum (what if Pride & Prejudice but with dragons?) and The Long Way Round (a sneak peek into Novak's next world).
• I absolutely loved Wisteria by Adalyn Grace. If you haven't read her previous two books Belladonna and Foxglove, pick those up. The world she's created and the characters of Fate, Life and Death are just *chef's kiss*.
• Moving on to TV: After hearing so many good things about it, I had to try Slow Horses and ended up binge-watching it in December. It's about the misfits and screw-ups from MI5 who get assigned to "Slough House". I love how the geography of London is also, most of the time, spot-on!
• I started my year with catching up on almost all the Star Wars I hadn't gotten around to. I watched Boba Fett, Mandalorian Season 3, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ahsoka and Skeleton Crew. Was it worth it? Yes and no. I'm happy that I finally got to see season 3 of Mandalorian: Pedro Pascal is still amazing in that and the season comes to a satisfying conclusion. Skeleton Crew was the most fun from all the others, and I loved the amount of Disney Pirate references in there.
• My highlight of January was hands-down watching The Traitors. I used to play Werewolf all the time at the unconferences I used to run, and seeing the game played out over a longer period with the paranoia and betrayal amped up? It's fascinating to watch. This season definitely had me screaming at the TV at certain moments.
• I enjoyed Silo Season 2. It felt a bit slower than the previous season, and with the stories split across two locations, I was missing the interaction between some of the best characters. I do love how we're slowly getting bits and pieces of the world and the backstory. And I can't wait to see more following that final scene!
• I finally got around to watching Lessons in Chemistry, starring Brie Larson as a chemist turned TV-cook-presenter. This show made me cry a few times, and the storytelling is just lovely.
• Having just seen Brie Larson in Lessons in Chemistry, I was excited to see her in person in Elektra at the Duke of York's Theatre. It's an interpretation of the Greek tragedy by Sophocles and the best way to describe it is "experimental". Initially, I came out of the theatre confused and unimpressed, but surprisingly, it stuck with me and made me reflect for a few days on what I had seen and how to interpret it. I don't think this play is for everyone though, and I wouldn't say it's an enjoyable experience. But I appreciate how it tried to get me to think.
• On the flipside of that: I went to see Much Ado About Nothing for my birthday and it was amazing! It starred Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as the main characters, Benedick and Beatrice. They definitely know who their audience is and lean in to that several times during the play. This is the 3rd adaptation I've seen and I love how each one brings their own unique take on it.
• In terms of movies, I ended up trying to watch as many Oscar-nominated movies again as I could. The Brutalist was interesting. I watched it over two days, cause I just couldn't get myself to spend the 3.5 hours on it in one go. Despite that though, the story didn't drag and I felt compelled to watch further. It was fascinating listening to this 99% Invisible episode afterwards though, and whether it was a good portrayal of architecture.
• My favourite of the Best Picture nominations this year (besides Wicked which I loved, but never expected to win) was Conclave. The story, the cinematography, the actors, the music - it all came together perfectly for me.
• But then my actual favourite movie of all the other nominees was without a doubt: Flow. Gorgeous, breath-taking and thought-provoking. Just watch it.