London .NET May 2023 with Lea Mladineo and Dylan Beattie

London .NET is back for 2023! We're going to be at Accurx in Shoreditch, with Lea Mladineo talking about how engineering saved the environment, and Dylan Beattie talking about email, capitalism, and why we can't have nice things.

Lea Mladineo: How Engineering Saved the Environment (and Enabled Business Growth)

In this talk, I will share the journey we took at FundApps to build a more sustainable future for our planet, and our business, by rearchitecting the core of our platform from a self-hosted, long-lived, single-process application to a cloud-native, distributed architecture in AWS

FundApps provides compliance as a service to the investment management industry. Monitoring over 15% of the global AuM for shareholding disclosure every day. Four years ago, we were at the stage where our core service was not working optimally for a significant number of our clients. Clients experienced unpredictable runtimes, slow runtimes and even batch process failures. And it was a sales barrier.

We decided to take the plunge and rearchitect the platform - and as a B-Corp, demonstrating our commitment to social and environmental performance, we did so while focusing on scale and sustainability. This is the story of how we did it.

Lea Mladineo is a passionate technologist who loves to get people together to solve problems. With about ten years of working as a software engineer, Lea has been working in London as a C# backend engineer, delivering value to FundApps' clients for the last five years. Follow her on Twitter @leamladineo

Dylan Beattie: Email vs Capitalism, or Why We Can't Have Nice Things

We're not quite sure exactly when email was invented. Sometime around 1971. We do know exactly when spam was invented: May 3rd, 1978, when Gary Thuerk emailed 400 people an advertisement for DEC computers. It made a lot of people very angry... but it also sold a few computers, and so junk email was born.

Fast forward half a century, and the relationship between email and commerce has never been more complicated. In one sense, the utopian ideal of free, decentralised, electronic communication has come true. Email is the ultimate cross-network, cross-platform communication protocol. In another sense, it's an arms race: mail providers and ISPs implement ever more stringent checks and policies to prevent junk mail, and if that means the occasional important message gets sent to junk by mistake, then hey, no big deal - until you're sending out event tickets and discover that every company who uses Mimecast has decided your mail relay is sending junk. Marketing teams want beautiful, colourful, responsive emails, but their customers' mail clients are still using a subset of HTML 3.2 that doesn't even support CSS rules. And let's not even get started on how you design an email when half your readers will be using "dark mode" so everything ends up on a black background.

Email is too big to change, too broken to fix... and too important to ignore. So let's look at what we need to know to get it right. We'll learn about DNS, about MX and DKIM and SPF records. We'll learn about how MIME actually works (and what happens when it doesn't). We'll learn about tools like Papercut, Mailtrap, Mailjet, Foundation, and how to incorporate them into your development process. If you're lucky, you'll even learn about UTF-7, the most cursed encoding in the history of information systems. Modern email is hacks top of hacks on top of hacks... but, hey, it's also how you got your ticket to be here today, so why not come along and find out how it actually works?

Dylan Beattie is an independent consultant who has been building data-driven web applications since the 1990s. He’s managed teams, taught workshops, and worked on everything from tiny standalone websites to complex distributed systems. Dylan is the creator of the Rockstar programming language, and is known for his live music shows featuring software-themed parodies of classic rock songs. He’s online at dylanbeattie.net and on Twitter as @dylanbeattie.