LJC Meetup at Capital One

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LJC Meet-ups is a series of events, aimed at giving all Community members an opportunity to present at an LJC event.

Join us on 25th June 2026 for a London Java Community meetup hosted at Capital One.

Speakers:
Melinda Seckington - Leadership & Speaker Coach
Topic: See It, Say It, Sort It: How To Be More Proactive

It's really easy to fall into a reactive rhythm as an engineer. A ticket comes in. You pick it up. Someone else makes a decision. You adjust. Before you know it, you've spent weeks doing good work… but not necessarily shaping what that work is. The engineers who have the biggest impact aren't the ones who simply deliver. They're the ones who pay attention, spot opportunities early, and take action without waiting to be asked. Proactiveness is a skill, a mindset, and a practice. And it can be learned.

In this talk, we'll look at a framework for proactiveness: Awareness + Intent + Action. We'll explore how you can increase your awareness of what's happening around you, clarify the impact you want to have, and recognise the blockers that stop you from taking the next step.

Speaker bio: Melinda is a trainer and coach, working with engineering teams and leaders to improve their communication, management and collaboration skills. She previously was an engineering manager at companies such as the Wikimedia Foundation and FutureLearn, where she focused on creating great internal engineering cultures. She’s an international conference speaker and has spoken at over 50 conferences, covering topics from good management practices to becoming a better speaker.

Stephen Galbraith - Staff Engineer at Capital One
Topic: From Fleeticide To Recovery: When Your Auto-Scaling Policy Becomes Your Worst Enemy

Horizontal scaling sounds simple in a README, but the reality of a Spring Boot fleet on ECS can quickly turn into "Fleeticide.” We've all seen it: connection pools saturate, health checks flap, and suddenly your auto-scaling policy becomes an auto-failing policy.

In this session, we go behind the scenes of a real-world challenge caused by lack of scaling. We'll dissect our initial assumptions and dive into the technical shifts that dramatically reduced downtime.

We will move beyond "CPU/Memory 101" to look at:
The Observability Gap: Tracking the "hidden" metrics (Thread pools, DB connections) that reveals how much headroom a service has.

AWS Patterns for the Real World: Moving beyond basic CloudWatch alarms to custom metrics and predictive scaling that respects Spring Boot's startup overhead.

Architecting for Elasticity: How to bake scaling-awareness into the developer workflow to prevent connection storms and cascading failures.

Huge thanks to our friends at Capital One for sponsoring this event and supporting our Community.