London Platform User Group (LOPUG), Wednesday 9th September, 6.30pm onwards

For our September meetup, we're back at the fabulous Accurx offices. We have two excellent talks lined up and the agenda will be:

• 6:30pm - arrive, drinks, networking
• 7:00pm - Welcome & Housekeeping
• 7:15pm - Talk 1: "Tales from Year 3: What We Should Teach the Agents"

Taking a platform that’s already running, with people, teams and purpose, and applying Team Topologies constructs to it, is a very different ask than starting from scratch. Over time, entropy kicks in, behavioural anti-patterns emerge, and external pressures have a knock-on impact.

In this talk we’ll cover what a Team Topologies transformation by stealth turns into, and what it looks like over a longer period when developers, and even leaders come and go. The tech stack changed, the customers changed, and the sensing mechanisms to adapt struggled to keep pace. “Ecosystem blindness”, “Not built here syndrome” and “Operational Intent Debt” were some of the patterns that began to emerge.

These “anti-design patterns” don’t just tell us what is likely to happen as your platform ages and scales. They give us a clear design brief for what we should ask of our agents. In the second half of the talk, we’ll look at how to use that brief practically, structuring agent tasks and behaviours so that the productivity sinkholes we saw in human teams don’t get amplified at scale.

Speaker: Maebh Booth, Senior Engineering Leader : Platforms, DevEx & AI
Maebh has 20+ years leading engineering organisations across platform, product, and delivery and was most recently Engineering Director at Marks & Spencer (2,000+ engineers). Since 2025, she has worked independently with large organisations on engineering effectiveness, platform strategy, and AI adoption across the SDLC.

• 7.45pm - food, more drinks & networking
• 8.00pm - Talk 2: "Hard learnt lessons for 4 years of scale up life"

Living and working through a period of extremely rapid growth brings with it challenges where what you're done in the past doesn't work now. Lets talk about some of those situations and the hard learnt lessons that came up along the way.

Speaker: Oli Woods, DevOps @ Synthesia
Oli Wood has been in tech since 1998, starting as a web developer. Today he does DevOps/Platform Engineering/SRE at Synthesia, a UK AI unicorn, where he was the company's first DevOps hire, four and a half years ago, seeing the company grow from 100 employees to close to 800. Before Synthesia, he worked everywhere from his own two-person startup to American giant SolarWinds, where he had the dubious honour of being involved in the investigation and clean up of the 2020 supply chain attack. Based in Gateshead, in North East England, outside of work you can find him swimming, shooting or pottering in the garden.

• 8.30pm onwards - drinks and networking.

So, please come and join us, we look forward to seeing you there.
The LOPUG team.

• Food and drinks provided
• Good time will be had by all