At JUST EAT, one of the things I am proud of is the reciprocal tech-talk exchange that I started. The aim is to make this a standard piece of doing business as a technology company.

The idea is that, during working hours, we send speakers to other companies. We’d like to try to reach the audience that is the set of software professionals that tend to not go to conferences. So, for an hour or so (probably starting around the 4pm mark of a week day), we can come and present on a set of things, and then subsequently one of your own presenters comes to our office and does the same.

The aims

  • Reach the long tail of the profession that does not go to conferences or user groups
  • Share hard-learned lessons relating to shipping and operating software – we love to learn from our mistakes, and we’re happy to share if you are!
  • Demonstrate how we’ve approached challenges and explain why we took the decisions we did – we want to validate them against outsiders’ contexts as well as our own
  • Entertainment!

Talks on offer

Here’s a set of talks we can offer (more to be added!):

Christine O’Dell

  • Modern monitoring for .NET platforms (duet with Pete)

Peter Mounce

  • Embracing DevOps @ JUST EAT in the cloud – how we transitioned our culture and organisation from 10 deploys a year to 800, on a Windows platform inside AWS
  • DoSing ourselves in production at peak time? What could possibly go wrong, and why would you do that?
  • How we monitor our platform to know about problems before the customers do
  • How do you know your code is working, in production, right now?
  • Modern monitoring for .NET platforms (duet with Chris)
  • Continuously deploying JUST EAT (has live demo)
  • Chaos engineering at JUST EAT (has live demo involving randomly chosen production server deaths)
  • Baking Windows AMIs with ansible for faster launch times
  • Debugging with stats and logs, not debuggers and profilers

Sam Elamin

  • Monoliths to microservices

Yan Cui

  • A tour of the language landscape : see what else is happening in the language space and learn about interesting concepts from F#, Go, Rust, Clojure, Elm, Erlang and Idris
  • F# in the real world
  • 7 Ineffective Coding Habits Many F# Programmers Don’t Have
  • Modelling game economy with Neo4j
  • Tame complex cloud APIs with F# DSLs
  • My adventure with Elm

What do we want to hear about in return?

We’re very interested to hear about most things relating to shipping software at scale

  • Coordinating large teams
  • Architecture that makes that easier
  • Deployment pipelines
  • Automated testing in production
  • Cloud-native things
  • Project management in a continuous-delivery world
  • War stories and what you learned as a consequence of bleeding on software

… our interests are wide-ranging, and not limited to this list!

The small print…

  • During work hours. Part of the point is to reach that set of people that don’t go to conferences & usergroups
  • The slot we can do is 4pm – 5.30pm on weekdays.
  • We broadcast the talks to several of our offices via Hangouts on Air (or similar)
  • We publish the recorded talks to our blog and tweet about them
  • We prefer talks that are a bit interactive — Q & A as we go, demos — rather than lecture-style
  • No sales pitches for products, please! (that said, a good war story from a customer of a product is entertaining, so there’s gray area here)
  • Because we use our offices as a venue, we’re sorry, but we cannot offer this to companies that compete directly with us
  • Subject to availability – our dance card is quite full, but we want to rise to that challenge!

Past talks

  • Ant Stanley, acloud.guru: Serverless computing
  • Ben Hall, Ocelot Uproar: Towards a Docker and containerised future
  • Stefano Germani, TheTrainLine: Anti-fragile systems
  • Matthew Skelton, Skelton Consulting: Logs as event streams
  • Boyan Dimitrov, Hailo: Microservices at Hailo

How to arrange?

Tweet us at @justeat_tech to get in touch, and we’ll see if we can sort something out. Looking forward to hearing about how you ship your software!