GOTO Night with Sam Newman: Definition Of Insanity

Date: September 29, 2025
Time: 17:30 - 20:00
Location: Philip Heymans Alle 15, 2900 Hellerup, Denmark
Sign up here: https://gotopia.tech/events/183/definiton-of-insanity

This is a free event.

Agenda
17:30 - Doors open
18:00 - Talk by Sam Newman, Definition Of Insanity
19:00 - Networking over food and drinks
20:00 - Thank you for today

Talk description
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again” - this quote attributed to Einstein warns us of the danger of magical thinking, hoping that trying something just one more time will achieve success when before we failed. But is this really insanity?

In this talk, I’ll argue that retrying things actually does make a lot of sense, and is in fact key to improving the resilience of a distributed system. Along the way, I’ll explain the importance of timeouts, retry limits and knowing when giving up does make sense. I’ll also show how retries can be made safe (and help avoid draining your bank account), and perhaps we’ll get to examine that Einstein quote in a bit more detail…

About the speaker
Sam Newman is an independent consultant specializing in helping people ship software fast. Sam has worked extensively with the cloud, continuous delivery and microservices and is especially preoccupied with understanding how to more easily deploy working software into production.

For the last few years, he’s been focused on microservice architectures. Sam worked with a variety of companies around the world, often with one foot in the developer world and another in the IT operations space. Previously, has spent over a decade at ThoughtWorks before leaving for a startup, and then eventually setting up his own company. Sam is a frequent speaker at conferences and author of best-selling books.