Talks: "The Little Lawyer" and "Agreement in Principle"

Rails at Scale is back in 2018! We're looking forward to two great talks this month:

The Little Lawyer: An efficient scaling technique for handling predictable traffic patterns using SumoLogic, Rails, DelayedJob, & Heroku.

Alan Norton, MealPal (https://mealpal.com/)

Why pay for scale you don’t need? MealPal receives in excess of 5000 requests-per-minute between 17:00 and 17:15 ET. At 17:20 ET, that number has dropped by two orders of magnitude, so it’s time to scale down... But, there’s an influx of orders in Sydney, Australia! What ever will we do? How many dynos should we be running right now?

Enter Little’s Law. Let’s do some math!

--

Agreement in Principle: Leveraging shared context to swarm big problems with autonomous teams

John Mileham, Betterment (https://betterment.com)

Some of nature’s most dazzling displays of coordination look centrally planned, from schools of fish creating a hole in the water around a predator, to enormous flocks of starlings dancing and darting in unison, to swarms of army ants building living bridges that optimize the route to a food source. Obviously none of these feats require a central communication channel, and none of them are planned in advance. By taking the time to build and deeply share a broad base of principles, Betterment’s engineering team has stolen a page from mother nature’s playbook to empower expert teams to run fearlessly, and coordinate effortlessly. Betterment’s VP of Architecture, John Mileham, will present some of those principles and how they’ve applied them.

--

How it works

Dinner and refreshments will be served! We leave 15m in between talks, and 30m at the end, for people to hang out and get to know each other. Come meet like-minded engineers who are facing, or have faced, that challenges you're facing today!