Level Up 2024: Tech – A conference by Redgaters, for Redgaters
19th June 2024 marked the 7th year of Redgate internal “Level Up” conferences, and the 4th engineering-focused event.
Since 2018 Redgate’s Engineering organisation have run an internal conference to inspire people to engage in their personal development, build capability across our teams and bring people together to learn, share and collaborate. The conference — which we called Level Up — got us out of our usual working environments to learn from other Redgaters working on different things and gather fresh insights & opinions.
Following Level Up 2023, it was clear that we’d outgrown the Duxford venue as Engineering continues to grow. This year, with an attendee base of over 200, we held Level Up: Tech at the Willows Training Centre in Wyboston Lakes Resort, St Neots, and it suited our needs very well indeed.
The core value of the Level Up event, “By Redgaters, For Redgaters”, held fast again this year. We received a record number of submissions, with 89 Redgaters submitting 116 session proposals! The organising team had a difficult job to whittle those submissions down to 43, to provide a programme that aligned with the event’s themes of “Innovation, Impact & Inclusion”.
The day
With everyone registered and ready in the main room, Carlos Eriksson and Adam Atreides (from our Engineering teams) kicked off the day by welcoming everyone to our new venue before handing over to Graham McMillan, our new CTO (and Level Up newbie himself), to set the scene for the day. The energy, curiosity, engagement and excitement in the room persisted throughout the day.
Despite many nerves, our 50 speakers delivered amazing sessions, with 10 of these being first time speakers! The feedback we’ve received indicates that there was too much great content, with many attendees having to choose between awesome sessions.
Level Up is such a fantastic opportunity for first time speakers, offering a safe, friendly and supportive environment for something which for many is a terrifying experience.
The sessions consisted of 30-minute talks, 1-hour workshops and 10 min lightning talks and topics ranged from technical topics such as Async C#, to introduction to ML, to storytelling (using Bluey!) and how to be a better ally.
With plenty of breaks, and a long lunch break, there were lots of opportunities to socialise with colleagues both new and old, and this is one of the major benefits of this in-person event. Now we’re working in a hybrid-working environment, we have 3-4 key in-person events per year, this being the main one.
Insights
We gather lots of feedback after our events to help us gauge how it went and how it can be improved next time. This feedback highlighted some key insights that were gained from those sessions…
AI and ML integration: there’s a strong focus on how AI and ML are being integrated into daily work and the future of the company, with many sessions discussing advancements and the potential for AI to change software interaction.
Leadership and management: insights into leadership antipatterns, mandate utilization, and effective communication highlight the importance of strong leadership and management practices within the company.
Security and SaaS challenges: security considerations, especially in the context of SaaS and ML, were noted as significant, with discussions on incident planning and the complexity of SaaS.
Effective communication and public speaking: the significance of effective communication was reiterated across sessions, with tips on public speaking and the use of creative methods like storytelling and cartoon dogs to engage stakeholders.
Understanding and supporting neurodiversity: the importance of understanding and supporting neurodiversity in the workplace was a key takeaway, with sessions focusing on this topic and providing insights into different working styles.
The evening
Not content with putting on a fantastic daytime event, the organising team smashed it out of the park with the evening event. The intention was to create a Redgate-vibed chill out zone, with food, live music, drink, games, with great weather – and our feedback indicates that we hit the mark on all counts!
It really did round the day off perfectly.
How did we do?
We very much want our events to improve year on year, so we place a lot of emphasis on gathering, and acting on, feedback from attendees and speakers. One of Redgate’s values is transparency, so although we shout about our successes, we are also open about the areas for improvement too. However, this year, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive!
This year 63% of attendees submitted feedback (another high!), and I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves, but overall, the vast majority had a very positive experience!
This year we introduced a quiet room, and a speaker room on the back of feedback last year. The speaker room was a hit, but the quiet room wasn’t really configured properly, so certainly improvements to be made for next year.
Allergen/food labelling was something else that some people struggled with. We’ll be feeding this back to the venue, and should we use them again next year it’s something we’ll work with the venue on improving.
Day crew
Helping to keep the day running smoothly was our volunteer day crew. These 10 people made sure everyone got their name badges, kept our speakers to time, help manage the lunch queue and generally ran around all day! Thank you folks, Level Up couldn’t run without you!
Event team
Finally, I’d like to personally thank this year’s event team. Since February, the team consisting of my assistant team lead, Adrian Banks (Lead Software Engineer), magic maker Rachel Borley-Yau (PA), Adam Atreides (Product Manager), Carlos Eriksson (Product Designer), George Mason (Senior Software Engineer) and Jeevika Rao (Software Engineer), worked tirelessly (alongside their normal roles) to deliver the best possible event, and we’re all very comfortable that this mission was accomplished! Being part of the event team is hard work, exhilarating, fulfilling and intense, but overall it’s fun.
They think it’s all over… well, not quite!
There was just so much great content this year that we’ll be re-running some of the most popular sessions over the coming weeks and months during our weekly 10% Learning & Development time.
Previous Level Ups
2018 (2) Level-Up 2018: Redgate’s Product Development Conference | LinkedIn
2019 Level Up 2019, Redgate’s Internal Tech Conference | Redgate (red-gate.com)
If you’d like to learn more about Redgate’s Level Up event, discover the career opportunities we have available and get involved.
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