Elastic London User Group

Please note you must RSVP here to sign up.

18.00: Doors open, join us for pizza and a drink
18.30: Talks begin
21.00: Event end

Speaker One:
Carly Richmond - Developer Advocate & Manager @ Elastic
Talk: How to Destroy a Software Engineer
Retaining Software Developers is a significant challenge for teams. According to the Infragistics Reveal Survey, 37.5% of respondents expected difficulty in finding developers in 2023. To retain talent and keep DevOps engineers happy, we need to know how to make them unhappy.
Join me as I discuss antipatterns in management, development, testing and monitoring patterns that can stop you retaining awesome software engineers.
Outline

• I’ll cover:- Alert volume evaluation, and how we alert bombardment leads to burnout and alert fatigue. I’ll also cover best practices for on-call rotation and BYOD usage to stop engineer burnout even when they’re not on call.
• SLO and metric comparison across teams, and how comparing team metrics rather than improving metrics such as DORA over time for a single team breeds animosity and demoralises engineers.
• Code reviews with jerkish or unhelpful comments, and the difference between radical candour through constructive feedback and pulling people down.
• Tool overload, and how selecting a common toolbox reduces the need for context switching.
• Flaky or poor testing, and how it builds mistrust and apathy in platform quality.
• Constant work items and a lack of learning time, and how a lack of training opportunities and space to grow leaves engineers feeling stuck.
• Lack of support for conference attendance and speaking, and how community connections help engineers grow and learn.

Speaker Two:
Alisher Alimov - Software Engineer at NVIDIA
Talk: Transition to a reactive architecture
The presentation is focused on practical aspects of transition to reactive architecture. It discusses the problems of processing large volumes of requests and managing distributed services. The presentation emphasizes moving from traditional blocking operations to non-blocking, asynchronous processes to improve scalability, fault tolerance, and performance.
Key points include:

• Introduction to Reactive Architecture: Understanding the need for a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture that efficiently handles client requests while minimizing errors.
• Reactive Architecture Solutions: Discusses how the principles of reactive architecture, including non-blocking I/O, event-driven programming, and microservices, address these challenges, resulting in more efficient resource utilization, reduced latency, and improved overall system performance.
• Practical Applications: Examples of reactive architecture implementations in real-world scenarios, especially in environments requiring high parallelism and low latency processing.
• Challenges in transition to reactive architecture

The goal of the presentation is to educate the audience on the benefits of moving from blocking operations to a more efficient, reactive approach, ultimately leading to more responsive and scalable systems.