As the team grows, products multiply, and the engineering organization evolves - the CTO role often shifts from a technical leader to a manager staring at spreadsheets and dashboards. And that’s when it becomes truly challenging: to stay in the technical loop, remain close to the architecture and systems, and keep a real sense of what’s happening on the ground. In this talk, I’ll share my experience on how to stay a Hands-on CTO - maintaining deep technical understanding, influencing architecture, and scaling the company at the same time, without losing touch with the code and core systems. Key topics we’ll cover: - How the CTO role evolves as the company grows - from coder to system-level leader. - The most common traps: loss of architectural memory, disconnect between business and engineering, dependency on a few key people. - Healthy habits that help keep technical context: code reviews, architecture stand-ups, "walk the code" sessions, CTO R&D sprints. - Decision-making systems: how ADRs and RFCs help maintain clarity and traceability. - Communication with tech leads: building effective 1:1s, technical syncs, and knowledge-sharing loops. - Tools and platforms that preserve context - dashboards, monitoring systems, and architecture reviews.

We are used to trusting our feelings: it seems that the processes are working and the product is of high quality. But feelings cannot be scaled. In this report, I will show how we moved from intuitive decisions to a system of metrics that measures the quality of products and processes in real time. How teams, with a “dashboard,” manage the development of their products in terms of quality. And most importantly, how technical metrics become understandable to the business, help to talk about risks in one language, and make decisions on a large scale.

This talk explores the journey of growth beyond the Senior Engineer role. Drawing from my own path — from Junior Engineer to leading the Node.js Department — I’ll share personal challenges, lessons learned, and the key turning points that shaped my career. The session will serve as a practical guide for engineers who have reached the senior level and are asking themselves: What’s the next step? We’ll look at both vertical and lateral growth opportunities, from technical mastery to leadership, from becoming an expert to shaping teams and departments.

Nowadays, there is a wide variety of tools for documenting software architecture. However, over time the question arises: is there a tool that not only allows you to represent architectural blocks as interconnected services or components, but also includes comprehensive information about business processes, information systems, and IT infrastructure in a unified view? Such a tool is ArchiMate. ArchiMate is a modeling language for describing, visualizing, and analyzing enterprise architecture, which, together with TOGAF, becomes a powerful instrument in the hands of an architect. During his talk, Alexander will share examples of the Archimate modeling language, show how Archimate can speed up architecture documentation and analysis, and talk about how they use the modeling language at their company.

There are many obstacles and pitfalls on the path towards operational zen. Many routes could lead to dead ends, and many detours could end up being loops. In this semi-comedy talk, I share some examples of how processes fail for engineering teams that I observed through my career, using two pillars of the Internet culture - memes and numbered lists.

There are many obstacles and pitfalls on the path towards operational zen. Many routes could lead to dead ends, and many detours could end up being loops. In this semi-comedy talk, I share some examples of how processes fail for engineering teams that I observed through my career, using two pillars of the Internet culture - memes and numbered lists.