Presentation: Keep Calm and Carry On: Scaling Your Org

Duration

Duration: 
4:10pm - 5:00pm

Persona:

Abstract

Ask people about their experience rolling out microservices, and one theme dominates: engineering is the easy part, it's people that are hard. Everybody knows about Conway's Law, everybody knows they need to make changes to their organization to support a different technical services model, but what *are* those changes? How do you know if you're succeeding or failing, if people are struggling and miserable or just experiencing the discomfort of learning new skills?

I'll cover a half dozen variations on this theme, all of which emerged from private/anonymized conversations with leaders & teams who survived the real experience of rolling out microservices. Questions like: who makes decisions? How can you tell if you're piling up tech debt that will make future you miserable, or cause people to burn out and leave? When are you routing around bad tech debt, when should you pay it down? When should you replace components, should you adopt an "immutable services" model or "always be rewriting"; when should you maintain your damn code? How do you know if you actually ended up with a distributed monolith, and how do you work your way out of it? How do you design consistent, scalable communication flows? And how do you balance optimizing locally for individual technical problems vs globally for a maintainable stack where engineers can move about more freely?

Speaker: Charity Majors

Co-Founder @Honeycombio, formerly DevOps @ParseIT/@Facebook

Charity is a cofounder and engineer at Honeycomb.io, a startup that blends the speed of time series with the raw power of rich events to give you interactive, iterative debugging of complex systems. She has worked at companies like Facebook, Parse, and Linden Lab, as a systems engineer and engineering manager, but always seems to end up responsible for the databases too. She loves free speech, free software and a nice peaty single malt.

Find Charity Majors at

Similar Talks

Tech Lead for Timelines Infrastructure Team / Sr Staff Software Engineer @Twitter
Core Systems Libraries Software Engineer @Twitter
Observability Software Engineer @Twitter
Tech Lead of Manhattan Team @Twitter
Staff Engineer, JVM Team @Twitter
Technical Manager Aurora / Mesos Team @Twitter

.

Tracks

Monday Nov 7

Tuesday Nov 8

Wednesday Nov 9

Conference for Professional Software Developers