Monthly Meetup - November 2019

Testing ON the production environment? Whaaaaat, who would even do that? This month's speaker, Mykola Gurov, that's who!

He'll be showing us the latest and greatest in making sure your code runs on live, all without FTP'ing a debug statement. After all, in an era where we can spin up dozens of machines at once, it's no laughing matter to keep "It works on my machine" from turning into "it works on my remote environment!"

This month's food, drink and space are provided by our good friends at Infi. We'll have our usual batch of tech, talks, tirades and a good laughs as we get ready for the holiday season and our upcoming hiatus so be there or be square!

Schedule
19:00 - Doors open with food & drinks
19:30 - Welcome
19:35 - Talk: Testing on Production – Deep Backend Edition
20:25 - Raffle & News
20:30 - Social!

Main Talk: Testing on Production – Deep Backend Edition
Embrace Production as a first-class testing environment to decrease costs and improve quality.

Thorough testing before merging to master is great, but it doesn’t reveal the unknowns. Staging on shared environments tends to be slow, unreliable and costly to support. Why not just learn from the only true environment by conducting safe and efficient experiments?

This talk is based on my experience of increasing the delivery rate within the context of back-end systems of bol.com (one of the biggest online retailers of the Netherlands; logistics and purchasing domains), where correctness is often a bigger concern than performance, and recovery might require a bit more than users hitting the refresh button of their browser.

Testing on production is often associated with A/B testing or canary releases, but those aren’t always the best - or even applicable - techniques. We’ll look instead at shadow and dry runs, controlled experiments, survival of the fittest; how to apply these techniques and what to be aware of.

Speaker: Mykola Gurov (@Ngurov)
Mykola is a java backend developer (calls himself full-stack). He has a keen interest in CI/CD, testing, and everything that helps to move faster without breaking too many things. Since 2015 he works at bol.com, one of the largest online retailers of the Netherlands.