April Meet Up

Announcing our April meet up - once again at the home of Austin Fraser: Thames Tower, directly next to Reading's train station!

Featuring:

~~~~~ Talk 1 ~~~~~

⭐️Dave Liddament - Beat the bugs, before they beat you⭐️

“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Software developers have a third certainty. Bugs.

Regardless of experience and skill level, all developers introduce bugs into their code. The longer these bugs fester, the more expensive the consequences of them become. So to improve the quality of our software we need to find bugs fast, ideally before they even end up entering the codebase.

This talk is aimed at beginner to intermediate level software developers. It introduces the concepts: type hints, assertions, and value objects. We’ll then look at how these techniques can be combined with modern IDEs to:

• Reduce the chance of introducing bugs
• Minimize the cost associated with any bugs that do slip through the net
• Safely refactor code so we can rename classes, methods, and variables to be more explicit

This talk will leave you with plenty of tips on how to write cleaner code with fewer bugs. And best of all you can apply them the next time you write code.

~~~~~ Talk 2 ~~~~~

⭐️Rob Piper - Architecting an Outage ⭐️

Every engineer knows that feeling of dread when you release a change, and suddenly a customer is on the phone saying that
they can no longer log in. What went wrong? You wrote tests, you did code reviews, you had an automated build process!
How did this happen?

This talk dives into a post-mortem of a real outage of a PHP SaaS application, re-enacting the flow of events at the time, and
their effects on a production customer base. We’ll look into the root causes of the incident, the design decisions that lead to
that point, and reflect on some lessons learnt about how we could handle things better in the future.

Parking

There is parking in an NCP carpark on Garrard Street just below the building, but this is very expensive. The venue is a five or ten minute walk from the Oracle car parks, which are much more reasonable, and the train station car park.

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Building Access

Access to the building requires a swipe card system, we will be outside the building from 18:45 to help get you in and will have others ready to ferry people up.

Call Chris Hoult on 07399 316 450 or Jeremy Williamson on 01189 520 159 if you have any trouble gaining access.

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Food and Drink

Our hosts Austin Fraser have kindly offered to supply food and refreshments. If you have any allergies please let us know ahead of time via email and we will try and accommodate your needs.