underyx

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.

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An introduction of the coala open source project.

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'.)

(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.

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.

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.

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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.

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