From New to Indispensable: Effective Patterns to Drive Adoption of your App

You've made a brilliant application - perhaps a new startup or a new major initiative within your enterprise. Now you need to get people from curious to effective before they lose interest.

Without effective onboarding, users will not stick with it long enough to discover the great features you've built.

In this talk we'll dig into what it takes to design and optimize an effective onboarding process with concrete examples from real application launches and equip you with a strategy for making incremental investments that can be fit into your development project.

Megahertz, Gigahertz, Registers and Instructions: How does a CPU actually work?

For decades, we’ve been creating ever higher abstractions between ourselves and the computing hardware we’re programming, but in the end whether you’re writing JavaScript, Haskell, or Python it all comes down to 1’s and 0’s running through hardware patterns that were well understood twenty years ago.

We’ll walk through the fundamentals of how CPU’s “think” in an accessible way (no engineering degree required!) so you can appreciate the marvel that is the modern CPU be it in a server data center or your fridge at home. You’ll learn how a CPU turns the code we feed it into actions, what’s the big difference between an ARM and an Intel processor, how CPU’s constantly optimize work for us, and where is it all going for the next few years.

Finally, we'll show how Meltdown and Spectre take advantage of CPU internals to expose data and why this class of security problems are going to be a challenge to the next generation of CPU's.

To The Cloud! How We Moved our SaaS to Azure (and it made us better!)

Two years ago, we had to make a decision whether to double down with new hardware in our Colo or go another way to grow our SaaS. We moved into Azure and haven't looked back.
In this talk we'll walk through the challenges we've faced moving from our own hardware to Azure including:

• Taking advantage of auto-scaling to reduce costs.
• Growing 100x without controlling the hardware.
• When it all goes wrong and Azure falls over.
• How Azure has improved the performance of our on-premises installs too

Far from a theoretical conversation about how you could use the cloud, we'll share real data from our production implementation, both the good and the bad. Finally, we'll talk about where we're going with what we've learned.

Navigating the Uncharted: Lessons from Aviation for Stellar DevOps Performance

In the vast and disciplined skies of commercial aviation, where over 50,000 flights daily ensure the safe journey of millions of passengers, lies a blueprint for operational excellence. This modern marvel works through layers of procedures carefully honed over decades of experience. Each event in aviation, be it minor or significant, transforms into a learning opportunity, guiding the industry toward unmatched reliability, safety, and efficiency.

Achieving these results - day in and day out - requires a deep understanding of technology, people, and the interplay between them: The same challenges your team faces to deliver consistent, great results.

In this talk, we’ll cover several key concepts from aviation, their interesting stories, and how to apply them within your organization.

Previously presented at NDC London 2020. The talk focuses on positive lessons from aviation incidents with a particular focus on a "successful accident" that had no injuries or fatalities but demonstrates how modern aviation harnesses people's talents and works with technology to achieve great results every time.