Open Tech Calendar

We're excited to announce Mode 2 Meetup episode 8, sponsored this time by Standard Life Aberdeen.

Mode 2 is a regular meetup about IT innovation within large companies across central Scotland.

Each meetup will feature two short talks and a chance to connect with IT innovators in a relaxed environment with free beer/wine and pizza. The talks for this meetup are:

1: Alistair Hann, Former CTO (Skyscanner) & Stuart Davidson, Enginering Manager (Skyscanner)

From 26 to 2.6 million releases per year

As Skyscanner scaled from an engineering team of 30 with one website and three services to a team of 100 engineers, release frequency halved. This is the story of the turnaround as the company went on to grow to 400 engineers, with over 100 services, releasing at hundreds of times the previous rate. The next goal is 10,000 releases per day – this talk will share how Skyscanner is approaching that and the implications for tooling, processes, and how the company thinks about writing software.

2: Fergus Strange, Senior Software Consultant (Infinityworks Consulting)

Move fast & don't break things

Testing between apps is hard? It doesn't have to be! In this talk we'll go over the age old problems of microservice integration testing and the toolkits and frameworks used to solve it.

Getting to Standard Life House

The building is on Lothian Road, and you can enter under the main stairs at the doors in the walkway that cuts under the building.

Contact Us:
Mail: mode2meetup@gmail.com
Twitter: @mode2meetup
Periscope: @mode2meetup

What is Mode 2 Meetup about?

Technology is evolving at an amazing rate, and customer expectations with it. Headlines are dominated by tech companies disrupting the world with new technology and fearless business models.

However many of the organisations we work in are far older than the Internet. Legacy technology, organisational silos and hierarchies are all around. Every decision involves many stakeholders and complex processes are everywhere. Change of any kind can be slow and difficult.

Can Silicon Valley thinking translate to our established, risk-exposed, regulated organisations? Should it? In any case, how can we apply technology and creativity to delight our customers and avoid being overtaken by competitors or disruptors?

We're aiming to create a friendly, relaxed environment where we can discuss the reality of innovation in larger organisations. There will be two short talks per month, with plenty of opportunity to network afterwards over free beer/wine and pizza. The talks will cover a broad range of topics about technology, business and culture change.

We need ideas and volunteers for future talks, although the golden rule is: no sales pitches! We're also looking for venues for future events, so please let us know if you are able to host a meetup.

We'd love to build a diverse audience representing the increasingly blurred line between IT and business across different industries: financial services, public sector, energy, consultancies etc.

Hope to see you there!