Swapping “Tech at Scale” War Stories

Thanks to everyone who turned up for the inaugural “engineering at scale” event we ran with Smarkets and Future Ad Labs last night. We enjoyed the opportunity to share some of the interesting technical challenges we regularly deal with, and hope it was enjoyable to attend. It was great to meet you all

The format of the event was a bit of an experiment, and was driven by a desire to engage with the engineering community in London. There are tons of people working on really interesting and difficult challenges, and we want to create regular opportunities that allows us to swap stories.

It’s very easy to become insular about the kind of technology you produce internally as a company, but it’s a benefit to everyone if we can share more.

In this respect, the idea for the event is a kind of engineering “show and tell”. By extending our problems we solve beyond the realms of our companies, we may be able to help others, as well as gaining new insights and perspectives from those we share with.

We’re still working out when and how we continue the event, but the format is becoming more clear to us. We’ll aim to achieve the following:

• keep the conversations centred on solutions to real problems
• be language agnostic (and ideally polyglot)

The format we experimented with included 2×30 minute talks separated by a healthy dose of Pizza and beer.

Pusher CTO Martyn Loughran spoke about how we’ve re-imagined monitoring for the demands of our multi-tenant distributed system. We’ll be blogging about a new tool for real-time stats aggregation, Stagger, over the next week or so.

Smarket’s Jakub Stasiak spoke about strategies for dependency injection in Python.

We’re open to feedback from anyone who attended about how we can make it more more awesome in future. If you have something you’d like to present about a problem at scale, let us know so we can start thinking about what we do next.

As a final note, many thanks to Unruly Media for letting people invade their fantastic clubhouse for the evening.