Lessons from the $750 Bill: Managing Massive Scale with Karam

From pricing up washing machines to customising coffins... and now saving the universe by controlling your electric vehicle while you sleep at Kraken Technologies. Unfortunately for you, you’ve probably run into code that Karam Kabbara has written at some point in your life.

Karam is attending the Software Crafters community alongside Senior Software Engineer Danish Javed at Codurance to share the hard-won lessons that only come from working on systems at a massive scale. This isn't a lecture; it's a candid discussion about what happens when good intentions meet bad production realities.

### What to Expect

We’re moving into a facilitated Q&A and group discussion, where Karam will be opening up about his journey through some of the UK's biggest tech platforms, starting with the infamous story of how he once came home to a $750 AWS bill... and how you can avoid the same fate.

We’ll be diving into:

• The True Cost of Cloud: Why "serverless" and "on-demand" can be a double-edged sword without the right guardrails.
• Building for Scale: Lessons on managing millions of connected devices and high-concurrency environments.
• Engineering Accountability: How to foster a culture where developers take ownership of the infrastructure they trigger.
• Modern Tooling: A frank discussion on the tools we use today (including the hype vs. reality of AI assistants) and whether they are making us better engineers or just faster at breaking things.

### Who Should Attend?

This meetup is for lead developers and tech professionals who care about the "Craft" in Software Craftsmanship. If you’re interested in architectural patterns, cloud cost-optimisation, or just want to hear some honest war stories from a Lead Engineer at one of the UK’s biggest tech success stories, you’ll fit right in.

### What to Bring

• Your curiosity: This is an open-floor discussion.
• Your own "war stories": We’ll be sharing reflections as a group, so bring a time you broke something (and what you learned from it).

Note: This is a discussion-based event. While you’re welcome to bring a laptop if you’re taking notes, no live coding or specific software is required to participate.