Unblocking Development Teams: SRE Melbourne Xmas Edition

Unblocking Development Teams: SRE Melbourne Xmas Edition
This final Meetup of 2025 is hosted at Stile Education

How you do manage CI/CD to keep developers shipping? How do you prioritise what to work on? When do you double down on toil reduction and when do you just live with it? How do you make sure SREs have time to work on fun things too?

A series of lightening talks on the topic of unblocking internal development teams – because reliability is for internal systems too! After these talks we'll open the floor for discussion and Q&A with our presenters.

⚡️ TALKS

Refactoring Everywhere All At Once: Safety A/B Testing In Multi-tenant SaaS
Alix Klingenberg, Lead Software Engineer, Octopus Deploy

At Octopus Deploy, we rebuilt the core engine of our product - without the usual chaos of a big-bang release, upset customers and a one-way door, or a cartesian explosion of feature flags. Instead, we built a safety analysis engine that decides in real time which version to run based on what a customer’s doing and what the new engine supports, to enable our developers to ship continuously. How did we pull that off - and make sure no customer was broken twice? Come find out.

Bug 0: Keeping bugs under-control, reducing toil and pushing down test flake
Nick Spain, Head of Platform, Stile Education

At Stile we have a bug zero policy. This encompasses actions items (for reducing toil and preventing future incidents) and test flake. This means we actively prioritise bugs all the time, they're not languishing in the backlog, action items are completed whilst people still have context, and we consistently work to reduce test flake. I will talk about: How is this policy implemented? What tooling do we use to help us? and where have the pain points been?

What If Operations Didn't Stop Team Innovation?
Iman Yusef, Senior Engineering Manager, Atlassian

Anyone who was at Atlassian in early 2024 would say that the JSRE APAC team then was different from the team today. The team was in constant fire-fighting mode. The team’s focus was pulled in multiple directions. Today, the team is thriving. So much so that the team just delivered one of the biggest and most complex projects for Atlassian, aka the Aurora Project. In this lightning talk, I will share the key changes the team made to transform ourselves from a fire fighting to high performing team.

SCHEDULE
5.30pm 🍕Doors open – food and drinks served
6:00pm ⚡️Three talks and Q&A and discussion with speakers
7:00pm 🍻 Networking and drinks
7:30pm 👋 Doors close