Craft Conference 2023
2023-05-18..2023-05-19
-- online --
[Craft Conference 2019, Craft Conference 2021, Craft Conference 2022, Craft Conference 2023, Craft Conference 2024, Craft Conference 2025]
who it's for
engineering managers, platform engineers, backend developers, devops engineers, qa engineers, software architects, developer experience engineers
topics
microservice testing with TestContainers; property based testing with Hypothesis; Telepresence for Kubernetes debugging; chaos engineering and game days; architecture topologies and team topologies; platform as product and compliance platform; WebAssembly at the IoT edge; Terraform practices for scaling infrastructure; orchestration versus choreography patterns; event driven systems with Kafka and Step Functions; observability with OpenTelemetry; code health and repo hotspot analysis
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Microservice Testing Techniques | Daniel Bryant | 42m |
Explains concrete testing choices: use mocks for fast unit feedback, use TestContainers to spin real databases inside tests, and use Hoverfly service… | ||
| The Art of Architecting for Scale | David Leitner | 44m |
Claim: modernizing code is not the same as splitting into services — distribution changes failures from logic bugs to availability problems. Recommendations… | ||
| Property-based Thinking | Aslam Khan | 40m |
Demonstrates using property-based testing with Hypothesis (Python) to write invariants instead of example-only tests, generating 100 generated examples of… | ||
| Towards Architecture Organization Topologies | Eduardo Da Silva | 45m |
Introduces Architecture Topologies as a practical map from architect-led to fully distributed team-driven design, argues that moving right increases… | ||
| Versatile Organization Design with the unFIX Model | Jurgen Appelo | 33m |
A concise pattern library for organization design that claims to enable continuous innovation and better human experience through recombinable micro-solutions… | ||
| Orchestration vs Choreography, A Guide To Composing Your Monolith | Ian Thomas | 42m |
Argues orchestration wins when workflows are complex or need coordinated rollback, while choreography scales and improves independence; recommends an… | ||
| Beyond Engineering: The Future of Platforms | Manuel Pais | 49m |
Argument: adopt platform-as-product beyond engineering so teams treat internal services as customers and remove cross-division friction. Cites data mesh and a… | ||
| A study of a large-scale micro component architecture | Niklas Gustavsson | 40m |
Spotify extracts telemetry and declarative metadata into BigQuery, builds a dependency graph (rendered with Graphviz/Neato and queried with graph algorithms)… | ||
| Promiscuous Pairing - What Really Makes Pairing Work | Arlo Belshee | 49m |
Claim: swapping partners rapidly and rotating expertise produces much higher throughput than traditional pairing. Teams use an egg timer and change retros to… | ||
| Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality | Adam Tornhill | 46m |
Code quality metrics map to business outcomes: empirical analysis of 39 companies and millions of lines across 14 languages shows developer time loss of 23–42%… | ||
| SPACE and Beyond - Measuring Developer Productivity | Ainsley Escore-Jones | 39m |
Stripe instruments developer workflow with a central Bad Day server plus Honeycomb and a data warehouse, emitting ~1.5M events/week to spot outages, slow CI… | ||
| My 19 Laws of Test Driven Development | Dennis Doomen | 40m |
Claims a concrete TDD recipe for .NET: align test scope with functional slices instead of testing every class, include real database when a type’s job is DB… | ||
| WebAssembly at the IoT Edge | Colin Breck | 34m |
Argues WebAssembly can let IoT firmware remain stable while shipping business logic as tiny, signed modules: a Rust pricing function compiles to wasm binary… | ||
| Engineering for Software - How to Amplify Creativity | Dave Farley | 35m |
Argues that software is an engineering problem of design and discovery not manufacturing, so teams must work iteratively, gather fast feedback, run… | ||
| Surviving the hyperautomation low code bubble | Bernd Rücker | 44m |
Banks take weeks to open an account even though competitors do it in minutes, so the concrete fix is end-to-end orchestration not point‑to‑point scripts: use… | ||
| C4 models as code | Simon Brown | 43m |
A text-first C4 workflow is demonstrated: a single Structurizr DSL file becomes a reusable model (people systems containers components) that generates multiple… | ||
| Lesson's Learned Optimizing Performance of Go Code | Frederic Branczyk | 42m |
Polar Signals runs weekly live optimizations against Kubernetes, Prometheus, Cilium and containerd using an always-on profiler built on eBPF and the open… | ||
| Why can't we all just get along? | Emily Webber | 42m |
Identifies three concrete anti‑patterns: one role across many teams, product versus engineering Wars and X‑led hierarchies, and shows their effects — designers… | ||
| AI Has Entered The Chat: Humans, AI, and the Art of Collaboration | Frank Chen | 43m |
Describes a working Slack prototype called frankbott built in about a week that connects GPT-3/3.5/4 style LLMs to a local vector DB (switched from Pinecone to… | ||
| Beyond build/test/deploy | Zan Markan | 35m |
Shows concrete CI/CD patterns using CircleCI API, Terraform, Docker and OIDC roles: a central repo provisions per-project AWS IAM roles via Terraform and OIDC… | ||
| Predictably Non-Binary | Yossi Sassi | 32m |
Claim: software builders face dual-use tech and personal stress but can reclaim agency by combining craft and art. Specifics: built a working hybrid instrument… | ||
| Level Up with Copilot | Rizel Scarlett | 40m |
Explains that GitHub Copilot uses OpenAI Codex to generate predictive code (lines and full functions) from comments and surrounding files, runs inside VS… | ||
| TDD and Hexagonal Architecture in Microservices | Valentina Cupac | 37m |
Hexagonal architecture claims the application core runs and tests without a UI or DB by isolating ports and adapters, enabling unit tests for use cases and… | ||
| Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems | Susanne Kaiser | 45m |
Combines Wardley Mapping, Domain-Driven Design and Team Topologies into an “Architecture for Flow” that maps an online‑school value chain, classifies… | ||
| Why Software Engineers Should Make Quality a Priority | Thayse Onofrio | 35m |
Argues that shifting tests and quality gates left prevents last-minute bugs by running checks earlier and automating architecture checks; recommends adding… | ||
| Developer Joy – How great teams get s%*t done | Sven Peters | 44m |
History of Taylorism frames the problem and the talk prescribes concrete fixes: start with DORA metrics and Compass, measure developer joy with a survey that… | ||
| Terraform Practices to Enable Infrastructure Scaling | Hila Fish | 39m |
Shows concrete practices: lock module and provider versions and enforce tagging; store state in an S3 backend + DynamoDB state lock with versioning; split… | ||
| How GraphQL is Transforming API Innovation at Netflix | Tejas Shikhare | 41m |
Netflix operates a Federated GraphQL platform with Domain Graph Services (DGS), a schema registry and gateway, handling 1B+ requests/day and 500+ active… | ||
| Perspectives on effective product development culture | Jason C. Yip | 40m |
Summary lists three core beliefs, nine guiding principles and seven key practices. Core beliefs name We’re In It Together, people are trustworthy and… | ||
| How To Fight Misconfiguration And Bad Intentions | Viktor Farcic | 34m |
Shows how an Internal Developer Platform built with Crossplane uses Kubernetes Validating Admission Policy to enforce concrete rules: example policy blocks… | ||
| Code the documentation instead of documenting the code | Péter Verhás | 37m |
Argues that documentation should be treated as executable artifacts: a Java open‑source tool (Apache‑licensed Jamal macro language) fetches real snippets and… | ||
| Weeks of Debugging Can Save You Hours of TLA+ | Markus A Kuppe | 43m |
A TLA+ model of a simple webshop reproduces a real-world bug: after about 1800 reads the backend sometimes sees no order because replication lag plus the wrong… | ||
| Evolution of deployment tooling @ Chronosphere | Mary Fesenko | 34m |
When the company is 1.5 years old it builds its own deployment system and after 2.5 years it runs in production: a CLI calls a Deployer service which kicks off… | ||
| Architecting Independent Value Streams | Nick Tune | 43m |
Argues that architecture must align business domains, teams and software into independent value streams and gives concrete techniques: use Domain‑Driven Design… | ||
| SW Mindset revolution in an Automotive Companye | Attila Mészáros | 41m |
Bosch Budapest runs a software-first shift: current high-end cars contain ~100M lines of code and the roadmap expects ~300M–1B, so architecture and tooling… | ||
| The anatomy of autonomous driving projects | Árpád Takács | 44m |
Continental's Autonomous Mobility team in Budapest runs a product-line for automated parking with ~250 engineers and thousands in the division, combining… | ||
| Event Sourcing: Superpower or super pain? | Heather Whyte | 46m |
Event sourcing records every change to insurance policies as an append‑only event log stored in MySQL (optionally CSV/parquet or Kafka for scale), with… | ||
| Bonding in a remote company culture | Gábor Varga | 36m |
Remote-first company builds bonding through repeatable, measurable activities: a quarterly Minecraft server with challenges and shared-screen coaching, weekly… | ||
| Leveraging constructive tension: build outstanding products | Ákos Kapui | 38m |
Claims that constructive tension is a deliberate asset for alignment and faster learning, proven at Shapr3D (110 people, $21M funding, 40,000 paying… | ||
| Cost optimization | Matthias Reik | 47m |
Tesco finds £1.8M of waste inside a £3M cloud bill and actually cuts about £600k by consolidating idle databases, right‑sizing AKS (clusters running at ~10%… | ||
| Women in Tech Roundtable Discussion | Viola Petra, Krisztina Dobos, Anjali D Leon | 49m |
Companies publish diversity reports and run mandatory anti‑discrimination and unconscious‑bias trainings plus bias busting workshops; recruiting teams get… | ||
| A practical tale of assessing a Microservices Architecture | Tamás Gelesz | 36m |
Case study of an event-driven microservices system uses source-code metrics, message-graph extraction and interviews to find concrete problems: a dozen… | ||
| Writing Documentation - Practices and Theory | Llewellyn Falco | 01h 24m |
Explains why internal docs fail and gives concrete fixes: make documentation part of definition of done, collect titles from confused users, sort into tutorial… | ||
| Getting Started with Istio Ambient Mesh | Jim Barton | 01h 27m |
Shows Ambient Mesh running from a four-node kind cluster on Instruqt with Istio 1.18 ambient profile, claiming sidecars are removed and node-local Z tunnel and… | ||
| Why does it always go worse than planned? | Jacopo Romei | 01h 03m |
A classroom dice-based game models a linear handoff process with a Google Sheet and ten sequential rounds; each person rolls 1–6 and passes inventory, teams… | ||
| How To Build An Internal Developer Platform (IDP)? | Viktor Farcic | 01h 28m |
Claims to build a working internal developer platform in 30 minutes and mostly demonstrates it: a Crossplane control plane on Kubernetes with Compositions that… | ||
| Dependencies; Devil or Darling? | Jimmy Nilson | 44m |
Argument that teams waste huge time administrating dependencies without fixing them and that the fix is organizational and design choices not meetings. Uses… | ||
| Designing Staging Environments | Lucas Fernandes Da Costa | 36m |
Single shared staging becomes a single point of failure (one outage cost a team of ~200 developers three to four days of work), so replace it with per-change… | ||
| Moving Fast: the Wise Way to deliver 200+ releases a day | Attila Pápai | 39m |
Wise runs over 200+ releases a day across roughly 500+ microservices with ~700 engineers organized into ~100 product teams, supported by a dedicated platform… | ||
| How to relate your OKRs to your technical real-estate | Marijn Huizenveld | 42m |
Argues that linking OKRs to a Wardley-style map surfaces the exact constraint blocking an objective, using concrete examples: a 3-month objective with 3–5 key… | ||
| Mentorship vs Sponsorship | Scott Hanselman | 43m |
Claims that mentorship guides, sponsorship spotlights: mentorship helps someone define goals and build skills, sponsorship actively creates opportunities by… | ||
| The Future of Service Mesh | Jim Barton | 39m |
Istio Ambient Mesh removes per-pod Envoy sidecars and replaces them with a ztunnel (node-level zero-trust tunnel) for L4 mTLS and waypoint (service-account… | ||
| Micro Frontend Discovery | Florian Rappl | 44m |
Argues the missing piece for scalable micro frontends is a discovery mechanism that decouples composition, not tight imports. Uses webpack Module Federation… | ||
| WebAssembly for the backend | Adrian Cole | 38m |
WebAssembly runs third‑party code in process using the wazero runtime, exposes a WASI POSIX‑like layer with only WASI 44 syscalls so many C programs must be… | ||
| Reverse Engineering Cloud Native: Interoperability and Community | Katie Gamanji | 31m |
Kubernetes becomes the de facto orchestrator and the ecosystem is driven by concrete interfaces: CNI (networking), CRI (runtime), CSI (storage) plus newer APIs… | ||
| Metaphors We Code By | Kevlin Henney | 49m |
Argues metaphors shape code and team choices with concrete examples: OS UI terms like windows/folders/recycle bin traced to 1980s design; naming mismatches in… | ||
| Share Pie: The DDD Treasure Hidden in Plain Sight | Nick Tune | 34m |
A large loan-tracking system gets simplified by modeling concrete cases — e.g., a borrower draws $50M from a $100M facility split among three lenders — and a… | ||
| CUE — A Type System for the Cloud | Aram Hăvărneanu | 01h 20m |
CUE is an open‑source language that treats configuration as programs and as JSON/YAML first‑class values, with native Go interop and arbitrary‑precision… | ||
| Dynamic Reteaming at Fast-Changing Companies | Heidi Helfand | 47m |
Five concrete patterns appear: one-by-one pattern, grow-and-split, merge, isolation and switching, and the talk gives tactics for each. Examples include… | ||
| Leading Through Uncertainty | Nivia Henry | 32m |
Argues that values — not one-off management training — make leadership changes stick, naming trust, clarity, courage as core examples; cites Gallup-style data… | ||
| The most dangerous phrase | Daniel Terhorst-North | 01h 00m |
Argument claims SOLID and Scrum made sense for 1990s constraints but now cause harm: source code used to be a sellable asset, DB changes were risky so… | ||
| Lessons Learned Building Developer Platforms | Michael Nygard | 40m |
A large legacy company builds an internal developer platform, spends about $10 million early on, and initially targets containerization across AWS, Azure and… | ||
| The Science of Teaming | Linda Rising | 53m |
Research shows team-size limits: Dunbar ranges (1.5 intimates, 5 close, 15 best, 50 good, 150 meaningful friends, 500 acquaintances, 1,500 known names) and… | ||
| You Keep Using That Word | Sam Newman | 47m |
Argues that “asynchronous” is overloaded and unusable without context, contrasting request–response vs event‑driven semantics, showing request–response can be… | ||
| Fixing Design with Tests | Michael Feathers | 41m |
Automated tests reveal modularity problems by surfacing concrete pains: long methods, huge setup chains, hidden globals and IO, Law of Demeter chains, flaky… | ||
| Breaking down large tests with a Saff Squeeze | Jacqueline Lee | 35m |
A PySpark pipeline contains a one-line bug (forgotten parameter causing an inner join instead of a left anti-join) that corrupts two months of data, costs a… | ||
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