You Have Control: Learning lessons from aviation

We live in a world where we’re dealing with increasingly complex systems. Websites and applications are no longer basic monoliths - they have rich JavaScript-based front ends, native clients, backing services, and as they get bigger, often start using multiple datastores and then eventually start running as multiple services.

As we move into this world, we bring ourselves deeper into the realm of distributed systems - where failure happens in new and exciting ways. We’ll take a journey through some of these problems, and how to start addressing them - looking to aviation for inspiration, who have been tackling issues like this for decades, and have managed to turn flying into one of the safest forms of transport we know today.

We won’t just look at code problems - we’ll also look deeper at the social side of engineering, and the changes it takes to let teams work on large, distributed projects well. How should you deal with cascading errors and alerts? How do you work on a single large project without stepping on each other’s toes? How do you handle incident response when something inevitably goes wrong?

There’s changes we can all make to the way we work as engineers - from solo projects to gargantuan, multi-company ones - to write better, more reliable software. This talk will show you some of the options out there that can help you, as well as showing how you should, always, be building for failure.