London Platform User Group (LOPUG), Wednesday 10th April, 6.30pm onwards
Details
For our April meetup, we're back at Accurx's offices in Curtain Road!
We have two fantastic sessions lined up as follows:
- 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, food, networking
- 7:00pm - Talk 1: "Build abstractions, not illusions"
Let’s be honest, the tech we have today is amazing but it can also be complex. So, it’s only natural that the platforms we build want to hide that complexity to improve productivity, avoid mistakes, and reduce cognitive load. So, the more complexity we can hide, the better our platform? Actually no - we need to be careful that we create useful abstractions, not dangerous illusions. This talk reflects on two decades of building complex distributed systems, highlighting where abstractions helped and where illusions led to major disappointments.
Speaker: Gregor Hohpe, Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS
As Director of Enterprise Strategy at AWS, Gregor helps technology leaders transform both their organisation and their technology platform. You’ll find him riding the Architect Elevator from the engine room to the penthouse, perhaps automating serverless solutions in the morning and preparing board presentations in the afternoon. His favourite pastime is dissecting buzzwords and replacing them with meaningful decisions and architectural trade-offs.
Gregor is known as co-author of the seminal book Enterprise Integration Patterns, which provided the reference vocabulary for all modern ESBs. His book The Software Architect Elevator tells stories from the trenches of IT transformation while his articles have been featured in Best Software Writing by Joel Spolsky and 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know. He is an active member of the IEEE Software advisory board.
- 7.30pm - more drinks & networking
- 7.45pm - Talk 2: "Organisational Sustainability with Platform Engineering"
Engineering organisations often face the consequences of building software in a way that prioritises short-term gains over long-term ones. This has a lot of sociotechnical consequences, including tech debt, retention issues, and, ultimately, business risk. This talk focuses on how Platform Engineering can drive sustainability through its DevOps based principles, strong support system, and standardised shared architecture.
We’ll begin by reviewing what organisational sustainability is and how Platform Engineering can facilitate it. The rest of the talk will be split into three primary sections:
- The sociotechnical principles provided by DevOps
- The robust support structures that enable platform adoption and faster delivery.
- The Platform architecture, its principles, common tensions, and a framework for how to build platform architectures that enable product engineers to do their best work.
By the end, these principles and practices will tie together to form a concrete case study on how organisations can benefit from Platform Engineering teams.
Speaker: Lesley Cordero, Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead @ The New York Times
Lesley is currently a Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead at The New York Times. She has spent the majority of her career on edtech teams as an engineer, including Google for Education and other edtech startups.
In her current role, she is focused on observability, shared platforms, and building excellent teams by setting reliability vision & strategy across The Times, improving our observability footprint, and cultivating culture that builds with the most vulnerable employees in mind first. She shows care for others by holding them accountable to the best versions of themselves – and by buying them the occasional bubble tea.
- 8.15pm onwards - drinks and networking.
So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.
The LOPUG team.
- Food and drinks provided
- Good time will be had by all