The Conference You Didn't Know We Need

I hope you have heard about it by now: our first Sky Tech Conference will take place on 30th September in Sky Central. For this day we have lined up 24 speakers, from all areas at Sky. They will give 14 talks split in 2 tracks: Empowering Builders and A Culture of Sharing. And you don’t even have to be on site as it will all be live-streamed to different offices across Europe showing it live.

It’s just another event on planet Sky and yet, it’s also the acknowledgement that Sky Technology has entered a new era. Let’s talk about that.

Isn’t it a waste of time?

I mean we are essentially talking of 800 man/days, right? The equivalent of a team of 4 funded for a full year. I am glad you brought up that topic of man/days since the concept was killed for good 40 years ago by Frederick P. Brooks with his must-read book The Mythical Man Month. And that’s exactly what this new era is about: a serious actualisation in the mental model we apply to software engineering. Please keep reading!

With communities and external conferences, why do we need one more?

Good point. We have accomplished so much with our communities. The Community Fair that took place in July speaks for itself. At the heart of this success is that we have triumphed over silos. And actually talks are a key activity within our communities. The Sky Tech Conf subscribes itself in perfect continuity with this movement. It’s the stage for the crème de la crème of our community talks. It’s also a guarantee that communities aren’t yet new silos in disguise.

Another thing we have started doing with our communities is attend and represent Sky at external conferences. But, hey! The best way to represent Sky at an external conference is to talk and showcase the best of our engineering. For this we need to rehearse! Bingo, Sky Tech Conf to the rescue.

We can’t attend, we have deadlines to meet!

I hear you! That’s why we have decided to set up a session to review all our roadmaps (a whooping one hundred of them, we can do it!) and identify the best new date for this event. I am kidding. In this new era, the 100% focus on short-term delivery is not the ideal way. Most of us got our aha moment when we started thinking of Sky Technology as a computer that would run on 100% CPU continuously across all cores with non-preemptible jobs. That doesn’t sound like a great idea, does it?

Of course we have work to do and we value timely deliveries. But one day won’t make a difference. And we still have to think, anticipate, figure out technical opportunities, learn better ways and stay abreast of trends. That’s an integral part of the job. Otherwise why would Sky trust us with building all those world-class mission-critical platforms? What could be better to achieve here than a day where we all share our best ideas and learnings on the stage of the Sky Tech Conf?

Even the busiest of teams should manage to send a couple of engineers to come back with the highlights, so that the rest can catch up later with the video feed.

If not, then great — this Conf has already delivered a lot of value. It has identified a team that is a risk to our operating model. Let’s fix that!

OK So Tell Me Why?

Meet

Meet your peers and connect with teams who share similar challenges. Trust me there is more than one. Meet the influencers of our organisation. Who they are could come as a surprise! Feel the scale of our engineering force. Understand its potential, for the world tech scene or more practically for your career. Embrace this One Sky Team.

Energise

Put back the fun in our job. It is tremendous fun to provide the best content and the best customer experience in the world! It is exhilarating to build the platforms that make it happen! And what about becoming a global business? Ludicrous!

If you’re like me, you could be subject to some fatigue with the usual corporate speech where everything we touch is a massive success, every single year is the best year ever for our business and yada yada… You know that kind of comm’. Well, the Tech Conf is a unique opportunity to delve into the details, to figure the ingredients of these successes and to directly challenge those who claim them. But also you know, you’ll see that not everything is successful at Sky and you’ll get to learn from that as well!

The energy factor is probably the biggest one. I have witnessed it first hand when back in 2014, I co-organised an Engineering Offsite for the department of Online Sales and Service. The energy we got out of it was really special. I believe it has something to do with the subsequent success of two predominant internal open source projects at Sky.

Trust

And here my dear colleagues, we are at the heart of our greatest challenge. There is one thing special about Sky. We believe. Mostly in better, but really the keyword is “believe”. Two years ago, the Not Invented Here syndrome was everywhere, hitting us even when two teams from the same department had major opportunities to collaborate and reuse. Each time it happened, we communicated to our business stakeholders and the whole tech scene “Nah, nothing good can come out of Sky Technology” with terrible consequences for all of us.

Now it’s different, we are killing the silos. That means we have started to believe in each other. But to get to the next stage we need to believe in our engineering, in the stuff we build. This is what the Tech Conf is about: to put some spotlights on our technology. One day to invest in what we do, does that still feel wasteful?

Attract

Easy one. Attract talent. Attract the best ideas and opportunities. Having our own Tech Conference puts us in a different league. Having all those fine brains in the same room will mathematically generate improvements.

Learn

There will be one thing you’ll want to do differently afterwards and I want to hear about it. You’ll also identify people for their expertise at Sky. You’ll find out about tools and techniques you didn’t even know exist. Duplicated effort you will discover and reclaim.

If you attend and you don’t get inspired by at least one idea, one person during that day, I’ll personally see to your refund.

You got the idea I think, by now. I just can’t wait to see you there!