Speaker Profile : Pierre Vincent

Tell us a little about your background, where are you from?

I‘m from France (the name was a bit of a giveaway I know) but Cork has been my home for the last 10 years. I’ve been working at Poppulo (formerly Newsweaver) for almost as long — I started there as a Junior Developer and had the chance to lead a few teams as we grew to be one of the best places to work in Cork. I’m now managing the Site Reliability Engineering team, which is dedicated to enable our development teams to deliver value fast, with reliability and scalability in mind.

How did you find out about RebelCon?

Poppulo being one of the sponsors, I had gotten word that something was coming up ;) Absolutely brilliant that Cork is getting its own conference!

How did you get started in IT?

My father is a Systems Engineer, so there is most likely a picture of a 1-year-old me with a computer somewhere! I was around computers for all my childhood and my first development experiences were coding gaming websites in PHP when I was 15.

I studied Maths in university and got my Masters Software Engineering in 2007… and then started at Poppulo!

Whats the title of your RebelCon talk?

Monitoring: How to increase visibility of distributed systems in production

Without giving the game away, what is the main takeway/learning from your session?

The companies that started in the 2000s and that were successful enough to still be here today are facing massive architectural challenges, with large systems, hard to maintain and to evolve. Splitting these systems is often the way to scale up, but distributed applications come with their own challenges and monitoring is one of them.

With large systems, visibility of what’s happening in product is essential. What I will be covering in this talk is the different reasons we need visibility and the different patterns and tools that can help achieve this.

Where are you working now, what part of your current job is your favourite?

I‘m transitioning to a new SRE Manager role at the moment, but for the last few months I’ve worked with my team to deliver a survey tool tailored to Internal Communications, to allow companies to understand the impact of their communications campaigns.

My favourite part of the job is the shiny “Deploy” button (even though it’s not usually me pressing it!). It’s so awesome to have a team of 6 people pushing changes in production 10 times a day — it has absolutely changed the way we think about building and running our product!

What's the craziest thing you've ever done?

Probably not a software related thing… boring software is good :)

I would have to say jumping out of a plane in New Zealand! (and paying for it!)

What are your hobbies & interests?

I spend most evenings running, working out or playing squash. I love boardgames, for both the social and competitive aspect!

What's rocking your world this month?

Finally became house owner!

Favourite band of all time please ?

Rammstein!