ACCU York: Software Developer meetup

🕡 Doors open 18:30
📋 Intro and admin 18:50
🗣️ Talk by Paul Grenyer (🕖 start at 19:00)

Beyond the Code: Designing Services That Stand The Test Of Time

As software engineers, it's easy to get lost in the excitement of implementing clever business logic: the algorithms, the workflows, the elegant domain models. But the success (or failure) of a service rarely hinges on its core logic alone. What really separates a fragile prototype from a resilient, scalable system is everything that happens around that logic: the invisible scaffolding that shapes how a service behaves, communicates, and recovers when things go wrong.

In this session I'll explore the often-overlooked aspects of building robust services. The decisions that make the difference between smooth operations and painful refactors months down the line. I'll unpack how thoughtful design choices early on can pay dividends in maintainability, observability, and security later. Whether you're building your first microservice or managing an ecosystem of services, you'll leave with practical ideas for designing services.

Key Takeaways:

• Why the non-domain aspects of a service are often what determine its long-term success
• How to think holistically about design, structure, and reliability
• Strategies for evolving your services without introducing chaos

🍕 Food will be provided, let us know if you have dietary requirements
🔗 Finish off with Q&A, networking, and 🍻
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About the speaker: Paul Grenyer
Husband, father, software engineer, metaller, I have been writing software for over 40 years and professionally for more than 25. In that time I have worked for, and in, all sorts of companies from two man startups to world famous investment banks and insurance companies. I have built and run three limited companies, none of which made me a millionaire and two of which threatened my sanity on more than one occasion.

🕡 Doors open 18:30
📋 Intro and admin 18:50
🗣️ Talk by Opeyemi Folorunsho (🕖 start at 19:00)
In computing, few words are as deceptively simple as "page." We page memory. We flush dirty pages to disk. We traverse B-tree pages. We paginate APIs. We build web pages. The same word appears across hardware, operating systems, databases, distributed systems, and user interfaces, yet it rarely means the same thing twice.

This talk traces the evolution of "page" from its origins in virtual memory to its role in storage engines, buffer pools, write-ahead logs, and modern web architectures. Along the way, we examine how page size encodes hardware assumptions, how page boundaries influence performance and consistency, and how pagination shapes human interaction with data.

By connecting memory pages, disk pages, database pages, web pages, and API pages into a unified mental model, we reveal a deeper systems insight: a page is not merely a data structure, it is a boundary. And boundaries define isolation, locality, latency, and scale.

Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how a single abstraction quietly shapes performance engineering decisions across the entire computing stack.

🔗 Finish off with Q&A, networking, and 🍻
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About the speaker: Opeyemi Folorunsho
Opeyemi Folorunsho is a software engineer and technology leader specializing in distributed systems, data infrastructure, and high-performance financial platforms. As Vice President of Research and Development at Moniepoint, he leads initiatives focused on scalable transaction processing, ledger systems, and platform engineering across cloud and multi-cluster environments.

His work spans database internals, consensus systems, storage engines, and large-scale event streaming architectures. He is particularly interested in how theoretical foundations such as information theory, concurrency control, and queueing theory map directly to real-world system performance.