Metrics-driven engineering at LonelyPlanet.com

Inspired by this talk at Velocity 2011 ( http://velocityconf.com/velocity2011/public/schedule/detail/17776 ) the guys from Lonelyplanet.com (the online companion to the Lonely Planet travel books and now part of the BBC) decided to apply these principals to their own website.

This presentation will offer a "warts and all" view of trying to use open-source tools like Statsd, Graphite (and their own bespoke Ruby Gem they build for the data collection) to move web engineering from "guess work" to "science".

1830 - registration and drinks
1900 - presentation
2000 - Drinks & Snacks (TBC)

Presenting will be:

• Dave Nolan

• Marc Watts

• Mark Barger

• Mark Jennings

Mark B. has worked at Lonely Planet for about 4 years in the Linux team. His primary responsibilities are site reliability and operational support. Mark relocated to London a year ago with Lonely Planet and is trying to see as much of the world as possible while here.

Dave N. I've been a Rubyist for 6 years in London, Prague, and Brussels. I've built technical teams and custom software in sectors from financial services to voluntary sector. Now I'm tech lead at Lonely Planet where we're creating a high performance travel platform. http://kapoq.com

Marc W: Marc has worked in web design and development for 5 years, from graphics and front-end development to operations and deployment, and everything in-between. Marc has written in many software languages, but now specialises in Ruby to develop and ship scalable applications at Lonely Planet. Marc is the creator of the Fozzie gem that is an integral part of Lonely Planet's metrics driven engineering

Mark Jennings started with the Digital team at Lonely Planet in 2008 during their last large website relaunch. Mark came to London as part of setting up a new Online team in London a little over 12 months ago. As Technical Operations Manager, Mark leads leads the Lonely Planet Online DevOps team and has been driving for metrics driven engineering since attending Velocity Conference in June 2011.