Talk proposal: HOW TO SAVE TIME, BUDGET AND YOUR IN-HOUSE DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

[sarahcarrwork]

Talk title

HOW TO SAVE TIME, BUDGET AND YOUR IN-HOUSE DEVELOPMENT TEAMS

Abstract

The age-old discussion of Agency vs In-House development teams. This talk will discuss a project facing this battle head on.

The team presenting the talk has a wealth of knowledge in all thing's development: Sarah has been a Developer for 7 years, Emma a Software Tester for 5 years and Oliver a Developer for 4 years, having arrived through the Software Engineering Academy at Sky. They all share a passion for software development.

Building, testing and deploying websites can cause a lot of issues that any development team can relate to. When building websites, the "traditional way" was no longer feasible, the team took a U-turn and changed their approach to the way the Business and Corporate tribe build websites at Sky. The talk will explain Captain which is a set of shared tools created to make the process of creating websites more efficient from code to development. More specifically Kraken will be discussed which was developed as a website builder to put more work in the hands of content editors and minimize the development overhead.

This talk is aimed at people who want to change their platform or legacy system, but don’t know where to start. Sarah, Ollie and Emma will talk you through the development life cycle of Captain and how we achieved this at Sky.

This talk is aimed at all members of the Engineering Team, from both technical and non-technical backgrounds. The team will cover how Captain came to be and the journey of defining our platform and solving the problem of how in-house teams compete with agencies.

An explanation on the tech used for the project will be given in detail, which is primarily NextJS, and how this modern app framework helps deliver scalable websites easier without the need for a boilerplate.

It will also take deep dive look at a range of topics including infrastructure, they will show how the infrastructure was set up using Octopus Deploy & Circle CI for deployment pipelines with load balanced on a k8 cluster using helm. It will also touch on how Sky applications are monitored to ensure maximum availability, a range of tools will be discussed including EFK, Grafana to interpret Prometheus data and Jager for tracing.

Expect an explanation of how software is tested at Sky from how a test is determined to be valuable to where/when to run it. There will be examples of tests running in the CI/CD pipeline using Jest, Testcafe, Backstop and Mountebank.

Overall the team will show their approach to competing with agencies by using the latest technology to save time and budget.

Your name (and pronouns)

Sarah Carr (she/her), Emma Hawkins (she/her), and Oliver Cavanagh (he/him)

Location

We are based in Leeds, UK. we are very willing to travel to most locations.

Contact Details

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Code of Conduct

• I've read and agree to the QueerJS Code of Conduct

[carolstran]

Hey, thanks for being interested in speaking at an upcoming QueerJS 🙌 🌈 I've never heard of three people giving one talk, but could be an interesting format. Would the three of you need travel assistance or would Sky be able to provide that?

[carolstran]

Putting you on the waitlist for now until we figure out the details 😊