Dan Abel
Staff Engineer, Pleo
London, United Kingdom
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Dan has spent more than 30 years as a software engineer and technical leader, learning better ways to ship and get feedback the team needs.
He's been the Dev in Ops teams, built new paved paths, guided engineering groups to better security, and trained folk in Agile engineering.
He uses his experience in people and coaching to lead and guide teams, strengthen technical excellence and grow technical leadership.
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Being Secure By Design: Engineer Led Security
Secure-enough software is a must-have, but there are never enough experts to work with every team, and solve every problem.
A solution is centralised control and managed releases that push product engineers out of ownership of both their product's security and their software operation. Other orgs risk the land-of-do-as-you-please, hoping their engineers make good enough choices with what they know to keep the business safe. Trust, enablement, and partnerships are rarely on the menu.
In the early 2020s, I had the opportunity to solve this problem. Valuing autonomy and flow in software delivery as much as solid security, I took a different approach: treating security as a platform, to support and enable engineers and the company.
This talk will demonstrate how a small team of engineers had a big impact on security across a set of engineering teams. And how Product Squads can grow to co-own security with an organisation’s IT stakeholders, so that teams can keep shipping features, whilst becoming more secure.
This talk will present how you can build a developer enablement platform formed of security knowledge and tools. How providing Paved Paths can engage with your engineering teams to guide them to own product security, and empowering them to make timely, educated, and informed decisions. This talk provides a map of the journey we took, the values we lived and what we learnt on the way.
It will help you build places in your culture where security can blossom, and you can deliver more safety.
Build 10x Teams not 10x Engineers
There’s a strong desire in the industry to seek out the semi-mythical '10x Engineer', whose productivity is maximal and can surpass whole teams. These individuals are rare, unique to context and impossible to generate on demand. Worse, they can cause as many long-term problems as they might solve in the short.
If we instead look to multiply team effectiveness and build 10x Teams, we can get many of the advantages with few of the dangers. We can gain productivity, adaptivity, and resilience that scales.
This talk will discuss our desire for increased positive productivity. It will bring you 4 team multipliers and walk through how you can use them to make your teams more effective.
I'll will share stories to demonstrate that both Managers and Individual Contributors can intentionally build super-powered effectiveness in their teams.
The Walls and the turrets: Engage and enable your engineers
Engineers want career progression, and when they don't get it they leave, or worse, they stay, stay unhappy, and stagnate.
Companies that invest in employee development see a massive uptick in retention and productivity. But managing engineers at different stages of their career is hard. New tools and perspectives are needed.
This talk will guide you through the career of an engineer and give you tools to support growth. It will walk through landing beginner engineers with solid foundations and helping them build a wall of engineering knowledge. Guiding seniors to go on ambitious missions and supporting staff engineers.
Come see how to put plans in place that will help engineers grow, and for you to avoid stagnation and churn.
Agile On The Beach 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Fast Flow Conf UK 2025 (Platform Engineering Edition) Sessionize Event
OODO
/* Here be dragons */ - Map out your microservices to navigate complexity
Agile On The Beach 2025 Sessionize Event
LDX3 - Lead Dev London
Being secure by design: Engineer-led security
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