📅 Tuesday, 18th November 6pm-8pm | 📍 Business Insider @ UrbanHQ, 5-7 Upper Queen St, Belfast BT1 6FB
Join us for an evening of learning, pizza, and sharing insights as John Gallagher leads a hands-on workshop on debugging real-world applications using observability techniques.
🍕 Business Insider is kindly sponsoring the evening and will be providing pizza and refreshments.
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Workshop Description
Do you struggle to understand why your app is slow?
Do you struggle to understand the root cause of defects?
Do you struggle to understand if your app is meeting business goals?
Modern apps are complex. Even with excellent testing strategies, apps can behave strangely in production.
I still remember a time when I couldn't diagnose production issues.
I'd guess.
I'd wait for help.
I'd lose hours.
I'm teaching the strategies I wished I had back then.
You will debug a real app with a real defect.
I'll teach you practical skills you can apply to your app.
Works on any stack. Any language. Any tool.
A reliable and repeatable process, not vibes.
Results I got - 98% less downtime. 83% fewer errors over 18 months.
In the workshop, we'll be using Ruby on Rails, but you don't need to have ever used Ruby.
Personally I'm sick of the theory heavy YouTube videos entitled "What is Observability?" that give zero actionable advice.
This workshop is the antidote - a practical, hands on session where you'll see how I add observability to real world apps.
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🗓️ Agenda
- 6:00pm – 6:15pm: Pizza & Networking
- 6:15pm – 7:45pm: Workshop
- 7:45pm - 8:00pm: Continue the conversations
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Workshop Facilitator Bio
John is the founder of Joyful Programming and author of “Software Design Simplified.” With 14+ years of Rails experience, John specializes in helping engineering teams understand their apps.
John has delivered observability workshops at conferences like Krakow Ruby Conference and has guided hundreds of engineers through implementing structured logging with OpenTelemetry, Dynatrace and other observability tools.
His practical approach combines deep technical expertise with real-world business impact—he’s obsessed with delivering massive business value while keeping code simple.
Based in Belfast, John runs live coding sessions and writes a newsletter on observability.
His mission: turn every engineer into a debugging superhero who can confidently tackle any production crisis.
Testimonials
John is a system observability expert. Not only he knows how to implement it to the fullest potential. He is also a great coach, who makes this knowledge available across programming languages and system architectures.
Ilia Tolliu - https://www.linkedin.com/in/iliatolliu/
I had a pleasure to attend John's workshop about OpenTelemetry in Rails backends. Not only was it very well prepared and hands-on, but the example repo was actually based on a real life issue!
I highly recommend collaborating with John, since I can't remember when I last had opportunity to learn so much actionable knowledge in a short timeframe, all while having plenty of fun.
Marcin Natanek - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mnatanek/
ℹ️ Please note that attendees will need to bring a laptop to participate. If you would like to participate but don't have access to a laptop, speak to the organisers who can facilitate sharing
