We're back for our second meetup at booking.com!

Here's a rough agenda for the night:

18:00 - Arrival (Food arriving from the start of event)
18:30 - Intro, talks start
19:15 - Break
19:30 - Further talks
20:30 - Close

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Talk 1

Tom Hoyland - 3..2..1.. Go - Building and Growing an Agile Team

How would you build a team from scratch? What techniques would you use? What metrics should you respond to?

In this talk you’ll see how we assembled a team, embedded agile values, a DevOps mindset and a clear purpose to create a squad with an infectious, high performing culture.

We’ll demonstrate the coaching and visualisation techniques we used to reduce batch size and improve quality. You’ll see how to reveal ‘hidden’ product backlogs, make the invisible visible, and use domain driven design, theory of constraints and language to optimise team resilience

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Talk 2

James Ridgway - Save money and reduce risk by deploying your applications as Immutable Servers to EC2 Spot Instances

Have you ever deployed an application only to have it fail? Have you then discovered that the issues were caused by a manual configuration change on the server?

Ephemeral environments are increasingly becoming a popular solution to challenges such as configuration drift. Whilst containerising applications may be one solution, this has the overheads of managing container hosts and clusters, which can also become victims of configuration drift.

What if every time you built your application, you provisioned a new server image from the ground up as a first-class citizen of your build process? Fully automated, fully version controlled, tested and immutable. Deploying your application becomes a straightforward process of launching a new server image and retiring the old server.

The immutable server pattern is a practical alternative to containerising applications. In this talk, we'll look at the benefits of using immutable servers as part of an immutable infrastructure paradigm and look at a practical example of packaging an application into an immutable server.

We'll take this a step further and look at how an Immutable Server is an ideal candidate for running as an EC2 Spot Instance on AWS, saving you up to 90% of the on-demand costs.

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Lightning Talk

Richard Holt - Mental Health at Work : Managing Stress
A talk I originally gave at the BookingGo Innovate week, talking about mental health in the workplace with a specific focus on managing your stress.