FT in the wild: Conferences we’ve been speaking at recently (Spring 2018)
By Georgina Murray
Here is a round up of conferences we have spoken at over the last two months.
KubeCon2018: Keynote: Switching Horses Midstream: The Challenges of Migrating 150+ Microservices to Kubernetes — Sarah Wells
Watch Sarah’s talk here
Read Sarah’s slides here
Sarah spoke about the challenges of migrating an existing distributed system to run on kubernetes, a cluster orchestrator
“This was my first time at KubeCon, a conference dedicated to kubernetes and other cloud native technologies. There were 3 times the number of attendees in Copenhagen as there had been last year in Berlin and it feels as though these technologies are ‘crossing the chasm’ to reach the early adopters.
I spoke about our experience with kubernetes at the Financial Times on the Content platform. I specifically focussed on the challenges of migrating a large existing set of microservices to a new platform, and the reasons why we built our own container stack in the first place and why we felt it was time to migrate to k8s.
I love speaking at conferences: putting the talk together takes time but I end up with a highly thought through set of opinions about the technology which helps me day to day. Speaking also means people will come up and ask questions and tell you about their own experiences — it’s a short cut to a lot of information!”
@sarahjwells
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https://continuouslifecycle.london/
Watch Euan’s talk here.
Read Euan’s slides here.
Euan’s talk provided tips, tricks and advice for developers and teams new to supporting production services, along with some incident horror stories he’s experienced in the past.
“This was my first full-length talk to an external audience — while the planning and writing stage of the process was very stressful, I thoroughly enjoyed it once I’d run through the talk a few times, and performed it at our internal Tech Talk sessions.
I’d had some great support from everyone at the FT as well, with some very useful tips, advice and feedback from more experienced speakers.
The conference went really well, and my talk was really well received. I definitely recommend writing a conference talk as it’s a very rewarding experience, but be prepared for how time consuming the whole process is! I was very fortunate to be able to spend part of my time at work writing and improving things — which isn’t always possible if we’re super busy!”
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Financial Times: Journey to container based microservices — Nicky Wrightson
“Micro CPH is the dedicated Microservice conference in Copenhagen, taking place on May 14–15 2018. Join us for inspiring talks about microservices, distributed and event-driven architecture, and get insights into the operational side of developing, running, deploying and testing microservices.”
Watch Nicky’s talk here
Read Nicky’s slides here
How we run our applications is always evolving — Monoliths to microservices, migration to the cloud, containerisation, improved orchestration. Containers have become synonymous with microservices but they present a new set of challenges…
In this talk Nicky shared some of her experiences and rationale behind early adoption of containerisation using an in-house written orchestration mechanism through to migrating to Kubernetes.
She discussed:
- Our motivation for moving services into containers
- The pain that went along with very early adoption
- Which development approaches and practices help or hinder containerising a service
- How our development process changed when we started running in containers
- Best practices and lessons learnt around migrations
- 3 years on: what do we get out of containers now and was the journey worth it?
“This was my first time speaking at an event which also happened to be an event abroad, at a conference that I knew no one which was terrifying. However everyone was so friendly and helpful running around getting me coffee which helped.
My voice was as jittering as anything to start with but then I realised I don’t only know what I talking about but I also really enjoy what I am talking about and got into the swing of it and even managed to get a few laughs from the audience.
I think I enjoyed fielding question for the rest of the conference as much as giving the talk as it felt great to be able to give advice as well and to show off the great stuff we do here at the FT.
I am talking at more conferences later this year so you could say I am now hooked”
@nickywrightson
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DeltaV 2018: ‘Speeding up without slowing down’ — Rhys Evans
Read Rhys’ slides here.
Watch Rhys’ talk here.
Rhys spoke about how we manage to make www.ft.com fast, while also releasing code continuously to production.
“It felt like a huge step up from delivering a sketchy version of the talk at a meetup to speaking alongside some very highly-regarded people in the field of web performance. Not to worry — it was a friendly crowd, and I think the frank confessions of where we’ve gone wrong — as well as some success stories — went down well. The conference also knitted together really nicely, and throughout the two days it felt like either I was adding something to points others had touched on, or vice versa. It’s a nice feeling to feel like I contributed something to that.”
@wheresrhys
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Eidos Media Customer Meeting : ‘Developing Newsroom Tools — Then, Now Next’ — Jason Mackie
How the Financial Times has evolved its approach to developing tools in a business critical environment.
The way we have built technology for the Newsroom has matured over the last 6 years. The goal of improving our release process, our quality processes, and ultimately our delivery speed has meant more room for developers to be innovative and creative.
The end to end process of coming up with your topic, creating content, and the delivering the talk challenged me in many different ways. The best thing was working on narrowing down and clarifying what you are trying to say and what you want to audience to get out of it. It helped tremendously in simplifying my own thoughts on the subject.
@mackie_jas
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DeltaV 2018: Where are the women? — Dora Militaru
Watch Dora’s talk here.
Read Dora’s post here.
Dora spoke about understanding and fixing the diversity issue in technology and beyond.
“I was nervous about taking the stage at a new and eagerly awaited conference in the field of web performance — lest I be overlooked as a technical speaker, evermore, by the community I worked so hard to belong to. I chose this talk because it felt more important to me (and always will) that tech, web engineering in general and also other traditionally homogenous industries become more accessible, inclusive, and welcoming for everyone. The crowd was fantastic, the topic resonated, and people spoke to me after the conference — some asked a lot of questions; I hope the dialogue continues.”
@doramilitaru
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Continuous Lifecycle London 2018: ‘How we A/B test at the FT: and what happened when we started testing headlines too ’ — Amy Nicholson
Watch Amy’s talk here.
Read Amy’s slides here.
Amy spoke about Ammit, our internal A/B testing tool, and how it allows the newsroom to test headlines on FT.com
“This was the first time I’d spoken at a big tech conference but it was a fantastic experience. Not only did people turn up to watch and ask interesting questions but I also had an, albeit very small, queue of people form afterwards requesting further information and offering advice on the Ammit tool.”
@amy_nicholson_
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JS Conference 2018: ‘When you assume, you make an error out of you and me’ — Gabrielle von Koss
Our choices in wording are frequently more powerful than we realise, and we risk using this power liberally and erroneously. Gabrielle looks at our ideas about how we communicate in our code and in our speech, and what effects those ideas have.
@gvonkoss
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Render Conference 2018: ‘But my site looks fine! Common ways we break accessibility and how to avoid them’ — Laura Carvajal
A great deal of what makes a website accessible is fairly straightforward to achieve, but only once we know what to look out for! Over 70% of websites are broken for disabled users, including those who rely on assistive tech, such as screen readers and magnifiers, to navigate the web. That’s a good 10%-20% of your user base who can’t access your content or pay for your product, even though they may want to.
In this talk Laura discusses some common front-end (anti)patterns and how they affect accessibility while otherwise going virtually undetected. Laura covers how to get the same results without breaking your site for disabled users, including real-life examples of how we’ve avoided these pitfalls at The Financial Times.
“I got started with public speaking a year ago with JSConfEU 2017. I submitted to that conference more as an exercise in getting over my paralizing fear of public speaking.
So I thought, naturally, submitting to the largest JS conference I could think of would be just the thing to do. 🙈
Since then I’ve spoken at about 20 conferences, and it turns out it’s less and less scary every time, until it’s rather enjoyable!
I speak mainly about accessibility, because it’s a topic that’s close to my heart and one that I will gladly pour 100 hours worth of personal time into writing a talk for.”
@lc512k
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The FT actively encourages and supports our Product & Technology staff who wish to speak externally at conferences, meetups and other events. We recognise that this is a key skill some technologists are keen to explore and expand on and value the fantastic representation of FT Product & Technology work.
If you would like to feature a member of the FT team at your conference speaking on any of the topics above, please contact Georgina Murray (georgina.murray@ft.com)
