Geo-distributed development teams in practice

Remote work, telecommuting, digital nomadism, working from home. Many ways to express a similar idea: foregoing the traditional office in favor of more flexible arrangements.

Covering both perspectives equally -- as a remote worker, and as a manager of remote teams -- an overview of the pros and cons of the approach as well as some lessons learned.

Shipping quality software in hostile environments

Everyone loves features, right? Product loves features. Management loves features. The board loves features. Features are what make the users use and the investors invest, right? They certainly make the media pay attention.

What happens when, for 8 years straight, all you care about is features? Productivity grinds to a halt, production outages are a given, post-mortems are a joke and job satisfaction and happiness are flatlining.

Lessons learned unravelling layers and layers of terribleness to rediscover productivity and job satisfaction while also improving security and robustness of the products.

Zero downtime datacenter failovers

When your provider is slowly but surely going bad and you have to scramble 70 virtual boxes and a sprinkle of bare metal ones over to a new cloud provider without downtime, how do you even approach this?

A tale of a migration that took 2 months to execute but over a year to prepare, mostly in the shadows.

The other side of webapp security

Protecting your backend and database is fine, but what about the users? How do we protect them, their browsers and computers?

In this talk we will cover the usual suspects: HTTPS and certificates, but also talk about some newer tech like HSTS and CSP.

Tech bankruptcy: Looking back on a decade of bad decision making

Since the dawn of software development, we’ve been faced with the same impossible choice every single day: do it quick or do it well. We do our best to make the right choice for the task at hand, and we move on. Then came the lean startups & “Move fast and break things” and put their thumbs on the scale in the favor of the hacks, the MVPs, the just-ship-its, and the Product Managers just ate. it. up.

That’s great, for proving a concept or finding a market fit. But what happens when that’s all you do? When the entire organization, top to bottom, has collectively forgotten how to write quality software. When you become unable to make the correct technical decision even by accident.

We will take a deep dive on a mission critical web application that is basically unusable on its best day, and trace the trivial bad decisions that got it there.

You will never take a shortcut again.

The platform is dead, long live the platform

Out with the old, in with the new. Replacing a functioning platform with shiny containerized automated goodness.

When companies evolve, their tech stacks need to as well. But sometimes you realize every single part of the machine needs evolving, and you're better off scrapping the entire thing.

Zero downtime migration from a legacy stack based on Jenkins, Ansible, Icinga, HAproxy, nginx, uwsgi, pypi, and Tomcat to a new one based on Travis, Docker, CloudFormation and ECS/Fargate with assorted tech debt solved on the way there.

A high level overview of current tech, leaning towards the "serverless" trend by having 0 self-managed resources ("classic servers"). Talk will focus on AWS offerings but is applicable to most of the popular public clouds.

It's basically a rich man's Heroku, with all the flexibility you might possibly need, while avoiding scary tech like Kubernetes which nobody wants to really learn how to manage properly.

missing the hype train, a retrospective

Five years ago we migrated our fleet of a dozen backend applications from virtual servers to containers, but our path led us away from the hype train bandwagon and towards ECS Fargate and Cloudformation. Let's look back and see what worked well and what could've been better.

This is a high level architecture talk, language-agnostic. It talks about a solution based on AWS services but also the design philosophy that should be applicable to any cloud.