TEQnation 2024: Lightning talks

Karol Muciek & Ali Habib – Empowering Sustainability: How Essent’s Innovative Approach and Habit Building Cuts Cloud Waste Understanding that Essent’s journey towards becoming fully cloud-native is ongoing, we acknowledge our current reliance on traditional infrastructures, such as EC2 and RDS instances. To bridge this gap, Essent has engineered a serverless solution that empowers developers to manage their environments effortlessly through straightforward Slack commands or API’s, accessible via a developer portal. This innovation enables Essent engineers to stop or start non-production environments with the same ease as turning off a light switch, marking the end of their workday or starting a new one by reducing cloud waste. Crucially, the cornerstone of this initiative was habit building. More than the introduction of a new tool, fostering a culture where sustainable practices became second nature was key. We encountered challenges early on—efforts to shift habits met with resistance, and initial adoption rates were low. Success came from deriving feedback from anecdotes and working backwards from the employees’ perspective. In this talk we will share our journey of identifying cloud inefficiencies, how we deployed an innovative approach to tackle this issue and how we built habits, empowering our development teams to adopt more sustainable practices. Guus Klinkenberg – From Puzzles to Proficiency: The Opportunities of Coding Competitions For as long as we know, we have been competing. Arenas were built by the Romans to compete. Put to two kids in a room with just a stone, and they will start a completion about the silliest thing they can do with that stone. Humans are inherently competitive. However, the work we do is mostly about market outcome, and the outcome is not entirely based on skills or how good we are at using our tools. Programming competitions like Advent of Code or hackathons are a nice environment to experiment with tools and technologies while gaining new or improving skills and insights. And at the same time, you connect with colleagues or new people. In this talk, we first dive into why these competitions can be fun, and how we can benefit from events like this. Next, we look into my experience while organizing various programming competitions. This will include some examples, takeaways and maybe a blunder or two, which will help you participate or organize a competition! Anjuli Jhakry – Public speaking: from biggest fear to greatest love Is the thought of having to speak in front of a group of people your worst nightmare? It definitely was mine! In this session I will share my journey from not wanting to speak at all around people, to confidently approaching people I don’t know. I’ll provide insights into my personal experiences and offer tips to help you become more comfortable with public speaking, even in front of large audiences.