Talks

Oh neat, so you wanna see me talk! Well, you’re in luck. I’ve put together 14 talks so far, 3 of them have slides uploaded, and 2 even have video recordings online.

Chaos Engineering
Kill Your Own Servers for the Greater Good

Held on Mar 29, 2019 Where?

On the cutting edge of technology, engineers have this new mania about this so-called "Chaos Engineering" — which is essentially ops people willfully breaking their own infrastructure. Crazy, right? Why would anyone do this? Just to show off? To fight off boredom? Is it just some manifestation of masochist tendencies? Well, it's actually none of the above, so I'll try to explain the whys and hows of this fascinating concept in my talk.

Check the slides ➜


Get a Monkey to Break Your Design
A surprising parallel between design and engineering

Held on Feb 8, 2019 Where?

I found a thought interesting on how the engineering practice of "automatically kill random servers so you're always ready to deal with that" can actually translate to design somewhat; you can amplify systemic problems to ensure you're constantly ready to deal with them and don't just forget that they can happen.

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.


coala
Linting and fixing code for all languages

Held on Nov 24, 2016 Where?

An introduction of the coala open source project.


Git Can Be Quite Nice

Held on Aug 23, 2016 Where?

An introduction of fancy workflows with git, such as interactive rebasing and bisection.

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.


GitLab Data Loss

Held on Apr 3, 2018 Where?

Post-mortem summary of our largest GitLab operations incident.

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.


Solving a Math Puzzle When You're Bad at Math

Held most recently on May 27, 2016; twice in total Where?

When greeted by a math problem whose solution consists of an equation too large to fit on my screen, the path of least resistance (and most fun) turned out to not be sitting down for an afternoon to try and comprehend it, but instead just throwing enough computing power and some controlled randomness at the puzzle to have my laptop guess the solution for me. (Yep, all that is just a convoluted way of saying 'a genetic algorithm'.)


Innersourcing
A way to have more fun and get more stuff done

Held on Nov 30, 2016 Where?

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.


Releases and how we tamed them with Crane

Held on Nov 20, 2018 Where?

(Editorial note for underyx.me: This description made much more sense in context of the preceding talk :D) 2:30 PM. You have just finished the latest episode of Adventure Time and life is great because you're sure production is working just as you'd expect. Five minutes later you see a Slack notification, someone is deploying one of your commits from last week. You start playing an episode of My Little Pony, cause no one really bothers you, except for one guy replying with "Cool." We at Kiwi.com have situations like this, too! Come and check my presentation on how we were able to get the mess around production releases into order, making them stable, predictable, trackable, and in general… just an uneventful fact of life.


Phish in a Barrel
The Surprising Effectiveness of Just Asking People to Let You In

Held on Apr 22, 2019 Where?

Phishing is certainly not the most glamorous concept in security, but it's the closest thing the real world has to xkcd's $5 wrench (as per the classic https://xkcd.com/538) — even amongst the most tech-savvy targets. I'll be explaining how we breached our own security at Kiwi.com with the constraints of an outside attacker, and how you can easily do the same (I mean, to your own company, don't get any funny ideas!) To end on a positive note, I'll also introduce how we managed to phish-proof our employees, so that we could cross this one out from our list of worries.


Public by Default
How Overcommunicating is the Secret to a Happier Life

Held most recently on Apr 11, 2019; 3 times in total Where?

The typical corporate culture is built on top of constructing the most 'efficient' and 'synergetic' communication channels between silos. Sync and catch-up meetings, games of telephone, misunderstandings leading to resentful blaming… well, to heck with all that! I'll be making the case for religious oversharing and acting like consenting adults instead, which I believe to be the (public) secret to getting things done as a company.

Watch the recording ➜

Check the slides ➜


Better Developer Experience via Building for Slack

Held most recently on May 21, 2019; twice in total Where?

The Platform team at Kiwi.com has the mission to help our engineers create ‘better software, faster,’ and building custom tooling on top of Slack provides lots of opportunities for quick developer productivity wins. Better yet, turns out we’re doing a fairly nice job at building them! What could be better then, than to come tell the world about all we learned so far? I’ll talk about how you can identify what tools you can create, which ones you should actually create, and how to actually design that app so that it elegantly solves your problem and gets adopted by your team.

Watch the recording ➜

Check the slides ➜


SonarQube
A (not new) (and not shiny) tool for managing code quality

Held on Nov 14, 2017 Where?

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.


SQLAlchemy
First impressions in the booking team

Held on Mar 30, 2017 Where?

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.


Testing Workshop
A tragedy in four acts

Held on May 29, 2017 Where?

This talk was only ever held privately. Contact me if you would like me to publish the slides after a quick review for sensitive contents.