London .NET July 2024 with Flavia Circiumaru and Alex Hall

We're back at Accurx in Shoreditch for July 2024, with Flavia Circiumaru talking about the challenges of supporting established products, and Alex Hall talking about creating code sketches with .NET.

Doors at 18:30, talks start at 19:00, and we normally wrap up by 21:00 and head to a nearby pub afterwards for drinks.

Alex Hall: Sketching in .NET

Artists, when constructing an artwork, will often create multiple studies & sketches before committing to the final canvas; experimentation and simulation are essential. How do we do that with code? One of the reasons JavaScript and Python had such popularity is how tactile they are to newcomers with simple tools, such as REPL's. .NET, like Java, suffered from a lack of early tools to simply play with your code. However, thanks to the work of the .NET team in the last few years, we now have a stunning interactive toolset, including Jupyter Notebooks, REPL's & more, unlocking the ability for programmers to plug & play, experimenting with ease.

We'll dive into how to make best use of Polyglot Notebooks, whether for playgrounds, data science or documentation. We'll also adventure into the .NET Interactive package to figure out how one makes compiled language interpretable!

Alex Hall plies his trade as a Software Engineer at FundApps, working in and around the .NET ecosystem alongside AWS & The Serverless Framework for the last 4 years. Partial to education work and sharing useful libraries with the community, you'll find some of his work under the moniker 'Look Mum, No Handlebars!'. While software is where he hangs his metaphorical hat, Alex originally trained as a classical composer & choral conductor, with works released on NMC Recordings, and is currently musical director of the London Humanist Choir.

Flavia Circiumaru: The Subtle Art of Supporting a Mature Product

There comes a time for every engineer to be part of the support rota of their organization. Decorated in a long list of recognition opportunities to expand their knowledge, be closer to the client, and extend beyond their everyday project, the challenge is usually welcomed.

At FundApps, each engineer would spend, on average, a fortnight per quarter to handle customer queries while the rest will be spent on roadmap items. At least, that’s what we thought.

As our services and features expanded, our handovers became frustrating transactions of context switching, disheartening ambitions to detect opportunities for automation, and unrealistic expectations that something helpful would be left behind before going back to our BAU. Half-answered queries, unfinished tickets, and undocumented changes became a weekly trend, that eventually reached a point where entire roadmaps got postponed. As a result, in a single year, we faced no less than 900 engineer days of unaccounted work, causing significant budgetary challenges. With a much-needed change of perspective, we decided to build a dedicated support team.
Come along to learn from our trials and errors, diving into the practices that worked best for our support ecosystem to drive resiliency, high-quality customer response, and planning our success in the long run. By the end, you will have a clearer idea of how your product can benefit from a different support model.

Flavia Circiumaru started her developer career as an intern for Equilobe and Microsoft during her Systems Engineering studies in Bucharest. She joined FundApps in London 5 years ago as an intern, straight out of university. Her software developer skills matured with time, having been exposed to architecture modernization, developer experience, and product design practices. Throughout her career, her interest in operational efficiency and learnability has become her main focus. A keen participant in developer conferences across the London scene, she’s ready to present what she’d learned for the past year as a team lead.