From our origins running technology conferences in North America and Europe, we created LeadDev, a community that has become far greater than the events that we began with.

As a result we've decided to become LeadDev: dedicated to helping software engineering leaders and their organizations perform at their absolute best.

Our history as an events business

We ran our first conference in 2012, jQueryUK, back when we were part of a digital agency called White October. In the following years, White October Events the company was created and we expanded our conferences, running AngularConnectSelenium, Render, All Your Base and an event for tech leads that we originally called "The Lead Developer".

While we loved all of our events, we discovered that The Lead Developer, or LeadDev as it became known, had found an audience of previously unserved engineering leaders, all striving to improve their effectiveness.

We were humbled by the community that we had stumbled upon: their openness and desire to lift the entire engineering industry up and to aspire to better practice. By 2019 and with LeadDev conferences in New York, Austin, London and Berlin, helping thousands of leaders each year, we decided to dedicate ourselves to this community. 

The White October Team on stage at LeadDev

Some of the White October Team on stage at LeadDev London 2019

The pandemic and the pivot

As a pure play events business the pandemic was an existential threat to LeadDev. But we knew that our audience had not gone anywhere, and were facing a set of challenges acutely amplified by the disruption of a global pandemic. We took our time to talk to our community, understand the world that they found themselves in and how we could help.

In August 2020 we launched leaddev.com, a digital publication that has become an essential resource for engineering managers and leaders as they navigate their changing roles.

In September 2020 we ran our first LeadDev Together course - an innovative format that allows groups of engineering managers from a single organization to learn and apply the latest best practice to their business.

The future

As we safely welcome audiences back to in person events, we're proud of the breadth of resources we can now offer to organizations and their engineering leaders, 365 days a year. We'll continue as we began, listening to you and your needs, and examining how we can best help you achieve your greatest potential.