Last week was pretty awesome for a few of us on Hamilton Robson’s software team! Yasmine, Jake and I finally got to attend Serverless Days Belfast. I’ve got to say, the Titanic Hotel was an amazing venue and definitely added to the experience. Huge shoutout to Yasmine, my fellow Placement Software Engineer, who absolutely smashed it as one of the presenters.
The conference itself was a full-day deep dive into everything serverless, which, as a placement software engineer, was super helpful. Even though I work with cloud services nearly every day, I’ll admit I’ve always leaned more towards on-premise and bare-metal deployments. This probably stems from my previous experience where bare-metal was often the go-to, especially when considering costs.
Serverless Days was a great opportunity to explore the cloud side of things in more depth. What really caught my attention was how they discussed use cases where on-premise and cloud solutions can actually work together – that gave me some fresh perspectives! In short it was a wonder day, and I came away with a ton of new insights. I’ve outlined my highlights of the day in this blog post.
One of the best parts of the conference was getting clued in on some technologies and tools I hadn’t encountered before. Here are a few that really stood out:
A massive highlight of the day was, without a doubt, seeing our very own Yasmine take the stage for her talk: “Slaying Big Data with Serverless Functions: Scaling up with AWS Lambda.” It was a single-track conference, so the room was absolutely packed, which was awesome to see.
Her presentation focused on our product, BeaconIQ, and she took us on a journey through the challenges of scaling data. She detailed the performance impacts they encountered when moving from displaying a working weeks’ worth of data to a hefty six months. It was fascinating to hear about the significant refactoring work she and another team member, Bradley, undertook. Yasmine was really open about the hurdles they had faced, not just the technical ones but the personal challenges that come with a big project like that, and how they overcame them.
Honestly, even though I’m part of the team and hear bits and pieces, I didn’t grasp the full extent of the problems they tackled and the clever solutions they came up with until her talk. It was a proper eye-opener and gave me a much deeper appreciation for the work involved.
She absolutely nailed it, especially considering this was her second time giving a talk on this scale. Well done, Yas!
The day was packed with useful talks but another that really resonated with me came from one of the senior team at Instil, Matthew, who is also an AWS Community builder. He shared a super useful resource detailing Lambda performance across various languages and runtimes. I was genuinely surprised to see Node.js wasn’t anywhere near top 10 – definitely some food for thought there, as I’d always assumed it would be up there! The observation that an older version like Node.js 16.x might even outperform a newer one like 22.x in some benchmarks was particularly eye-opening.
What was also seriously impressive was his story about tackling a project where the client’s proposed tech stack requirements were well outside their usual comfort zone. He walked us through how they not only adapted but went above and beyond to make that specific tech stack efficient and performant for the client. It was a brilliant real-world example of problem-solving, adaptability, and really pushing technical boundaries to deliver what the client needed.
Serverless Days Belfast was a fantastic experience. It wasn’t just about the new tech; it was about seeing practical applications, hearing from people tackling real challenges, and getting a fresh perspective on how different solutions can work together. I definitely came away buzzing with ideas.
And what better way to wrap up such an insightful day? Afterwards, we all sat down for a well-deserved pint of Guinness to celebrate not only a great conference but also Yasmine’s brilliant presentation – and, of course, to soak up the amazing weather we rarely get here! Cheers to that!
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