Finch is an open source HTTP library built on top of Finagle, the RPC framework that powers Twitter’s infrastructure. Finch is a great candidate to use when building services, and compares favourably to other popular frameworks in languages such as Ruby, Go, JavaScript, Elixir, Clojure and Haskell. This talk outlines the types of problems faced when building small services, and how using a good type system can help. I introduce & outline Finch, highlighting how it addresses these concerns. Throughout, a concrete example of an API built for a startup using Finch is used.

This talk outlines our experiences using Scala to build an Android app. We explore the benefits of using Scala instead of Java for Android development.

Attendees will learn the benefits & pitfalls of using Scala to develop an Android app, including guidance on toolchain selection, common libraries & traps to avoid.

In small, fast moving companies, career development is often overlooked in favour of other things, such as building the product & growing revenue. As a leader in a small company, it is relatively easy to assess salary fairness, opportunities for growth are obvious, and it is easy to mentor within a close knit team. However as the company grows, supporting career development becomes harder, and movement in the employment market often leads to unintentional salary unfairness. Career ladders & salary bands are a well known way to introduce some level of structure to people’s roles, and their future growth. However ladders still contain ambiguity and bands don’t solve fairness issues.

At Redbubble we have been working on introducing an impact model for assessing contribution and a skills model for helping with personal career growth. We’ll give an overview of our experiences building and rolling out the model at scale, including the pitfalls, and also highlight how we use the model during hiring.

Finch is an open source HTTP library built on top of Finagle, the RPC framework that powers Twitter’s infrastructure. Finch is a great candidate to use when building services, and compares favourably to other popular frameworks in languages such as Ruby, Go, JavaScript, Elixir, Clojure and Haskell. This talk outlines the types of problems faced when building small services, and how using a good type system can help. I introduce & outline Finch, highlighting how it addresses these concerns. Throughout, a concrete example of an API built for a startup using Finch is used.

Distribution is hard. Building engineering teams is hard. And building distributed engineering teams presents unique challenges, especially under hyper growth.

Cash App is one of the fastest growing financial products in the US & UK. We have tens of millions of users & move hundreds of millions of dollars a day. We have product engineering teams in several cities in the US, Canada, Sweden and Australia. Our product velocity & commercial growth is constrained by the number of engineers on our teams, and utilising a distributed team is one way to sustain this growth.

In this talk, we’ll speak about the challenges growing a small engineering team in a single location into a large team spread across many locations & multiple timezones. We’ll outline some of the things we’ve learnt, and present some rules of thumb that we use when making decisions about distributed teams.