Cape Town Microservices - Event No. 1

The inaugural event of the Cape Town Microservices Meetup.

~~~ Agenda ~~~~

17:30 Venue opens
Drinks, pizza, and networking.
18:30 First speaker
19:00 Second Speaker
Q&A and networking until close at 20:30

The Speakers;

First Speaker - Shaun Barlow
Engineering Manager at Stitch

Shaun is an Engineering manager at Cape Town-based Stich, a payments company that helps businesses seamlessly connect to the financial system to scale faster. He has been building software professionally for the last 17 years. He started out building in C++ on devices with less processing power than your average phone, which taught him a lot about designing for reliability and backwards compatibility. Four years ago, he made a career pivot from embedded software to the world of payments and microservices and hasn't looked back.

Sizing microservices from a hardware thinking perspective

"As a team, we've recently had to decide how to split the different components of our system while planning for scale. As always, this is a tricky topic! I found it a helpful mental model to think about how I would break things down if those services were limited to actual separate microprocessors. As in the tiny physical piece of hardware. This talk will share some insights into on how we made those decisions for the current product we're building. I'll talk about the pros and cons of different size choices and some of the pitfalls you can hit with each."

Second Speaker- Sascha Ramin
Engineering Manager at Utility Warehouse

Sascha’s been doing unusual things with computers since the age of 16 when he first broke/changed the family computer by installing OpenBSD on it. Since then he’s worn many hats and only a small number of monkeys. Everything from running a hosting provider on bare metal, to doing big data with massive hadoop clusters, to writing one too many micro services running on multi cloud kubernetes clusters. Currently he’s a Head of Engineering over seeing multiple developer teams trying to work out the goldielox position between complexity, performance and sleeping well at night.

Engineering - Or how I learned to make trade offs

The talk is a reflection on what it means to have `Engineer` in most of our titles, what do we share in common with other engineering disciplines and what can we learn from them. With that refreshed understanding, how can we approach the age old questions of, what is are microservices, how big should they be, and why. The answer is undoubtedly, “it depends” but I hope to give new life to that statement, with a deeper appreciation of the trade offs and why we might pick one over another.