The fine lines between chaos and order
summary
A large bank grows from about 120 to 320 engineers and ends up with a mobile stack that has 900 dependencies, causing cascading failures and about 91% availability early on. The response is concrete: adopt the Cynefin frame and Wardley mapping, enforce four industrialised patterns (iOS, Android, micro-frontends, Spring Boot APIs), cut 25 variants to 1 API pattern, target 80% build-from-patterns, introduce platform teams and a self-service threat modelling flow so governance moves from months to days and feature flags use LaunchDarkly or equivalents.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (11)
- 0:00Prae welcomes Jade Thomas to the stage
- 0:38Jade's introduction
- 3:05How did his large bank get into this state of chaos?
- 5:38Cynefin framework
- 6:39Taoist belief on balance of Chaos and order
- 9:08Creating strong engineering culture
- 10:23Identifying owners, and structuring ownership model
- 14:24Industrialised patterns
- 16:35Continuously simplify
- 25:03Audience question 1: How do you induct new people into your engineering culture?
- 26:27Audience question 2: What do you mean by industrialised patterns?
related talks
53mScaling Engineering by Hacking Conway's Law
53mHatching software development ecosystems (the gordian knot)
20mDoing Things the Hard Way
01h 03mBeyond the innovator’s dilemma
01h 00mAndroid at Scale
44mThe Art of Architecting for Scale
41mHow I Finally Stopped Worrying & Learnt to Love Conway’s Law
42mFrom Chaos to Control, from Control to Freedom