StreetCon 2024
It’s here! It’s conference day!
And when our team of over forty engineers spread across eight teams and three products all come together in the same room, how does a good day start?
Pastries! Lots of pastries! And of course, coffee!
Once the last of the croissant crumbs had been brushed away and the last droplets devoured from coffee cups, the team got comfortable in the Auditorium, ready for a day of learning and sharing.
After an introduction from our owner, Tom, and the necessary house keeping announcements, it was time to commence!
Street Engineering in 2024 by Chris Grice
With the vast majority of the Street Group Engineering team in one room, this seemed the perfect opportunity for our Head of Engineering to give an overview of how the department grew and performed in 2023, with some very impressive stats.
Then Chris outlined the intentions of the Street Group Engineering team for 2024, our expected growth in terms of new individuals joining, new teams being created, and opportunities for us all to learn and grow with the company.
Product Lead Growth by Charlotte Nolan
Working as the Product Owner for our Insights product, Charlotte was able to utilise data and knowledge from their own product to explain and demonstrate the benefits of product lead growth, with real world examples not only from within Street, but also other Tech companies in the world, and how the Insights team were able to identify value metrics and strategies based on those to increase uptake and usage with their own product which, by the conversations that followed her talk, definitely got a lot of our minds working on how we can implement similar strategies across the business in other products.
Now was time for a quick break, a refill of those coffee cups and lots of continued conversations, before the next batch of speakers.
But first, a bit of a StreetCon tradition, inspired by the TikTok sensation of “Roll for Sandwich” using the power of the dice, we created the StreetCon 2024 sandwich. And given by the monstrosity we ended up with, I don’t think anyone will be ordering one any time soon! Ham, vegan cheese, sprouts, cucumber and mustard on sourdough! …nah, I’m good thank you!
For Your Safety by Evan Burrell
Once we got the idea of that sandwich out of our heads, it was Evan’s job to make us all feel safe again. Covering various different areas, from coding safety and future protecting your code, to psychological safety and the concept of giving and receiving feedback, to organisational safety and documenting decisions your future self and colleagues will thank you for.
Design Patterns in PHP by Matt Williams
Despite technical problems plaguing him throughout his presentation, the ever-professional “Head Lemon” gave us an insightful presentation on Design Patterns, with examples in PHP, explanations on a few of them, when best to utilise them, and they gave us examples within the Laravel framework where we all use these exact Design Patterns maybe without realising we are.
With our heads starting to get full, the last of those croissant crumbs had worn off and it was time to turn our attention our stomachs. As forty hungry engineers left the auditorium and entered the kitchen, the audible gasps and cheers could be heard through the building as we were greeted by pies! Lots of pies! Pies, and mash and gravy!
Now, suitably stuffed with pies and mash potato, forty engineers squeezed back into the auditorium for the afternoon of talks. Let’s hope there’s nothing too heavy…
Journeys with Jamie: Lessons from the Campaigns Trail by Jamie Redfern
Thankfully, Jamie’s subject matter, humour and entertainment factor (if you’ve ever experienced a Jamie presentation, you know what I mean) was enough to keep the audience from falling asleep in a “pie and mash coma”, with some very interesting insights on lessons learned from their recent Campaigns project in the Spectre teams, informing us of what went well, what didn’t and what was learned along the way to help improve not only the Spectre teams approach to future projects but also to allow the engineers on different teams to learn from the experiences too.
Your REST API should be a function by Chris Grice
Pulling double-duty, Chris took to the floor again, this time to give a talk on REST APIs, the pros and cons of them, and introduced us to the concept of alternatives to REST, mainly in the gRPC area, with examples of how we could have approached technological challenges we’ve experienced and solved within Street Group and how we could also have also solved them in a different way.One last break for the day, before the last talk by one of the events co-organisers.
Canary in the coal mine by Chris Amor
Rather than a set of prepared slides, Chris instead gave us a live demo of how the Kraken team approach performance and load testing. Building and maintaining an API such as Kraken that is used by so many different products and areas not only within the products but across the country, it is vital to ensure that it can handle the amount of requests it receives without impacting its performance. Chris explained how they set up tests for this using the K6 tooling from Grafana to ensure that their services could withstand and deliver with increased demands.
Hot Topics by all
The end of the day was an opportunity for anyone who had a lightbulb moments throughout the day to share and contribute either with their own talks or to open up discussions across the wider team. From a presentation on Vue Composables by James Davies, to discussions on opportunities for more training and sharing knowledge, to xDebug and of course some general, lighthearted banter across the department.
And that was all she wrote.
Overall an incredible day filled with knowledge from a multitude of areas, whether that be the more tech-heavy talks, to looking at things from a product perspective, to mindset shifts and keeping safe.
On behalf of everyone who attended, thank you to all the speakers, and the organisers of this year’s StreetCon, and to Street Group for providing the food and refreshments throughout the day.
See you all next year, at StreetCon 2025?
To find out more about life at Street Group, follow us on LinkedIn, see what our team are saying on Glassdoor, or visit our careers site.
