I was lucky enough to attend the Serverless Days Belfast conference last week. This year, while there were the usual talks on serverless and cloud development, the spotlight was definitely on AI aided development.
I’ll first list my standout sessions from the day and then give my thoughts on the conference and topics overall.
A Tale of Two Monoliths: Serving Up a Modernisation Feast at Flipdish
Ryan Shirley & Marc O’Morain from Flipdish gave what I thought was the best talk of the day - it presented a business problem, identified the underlying technical issues, designed a solution, and then detailed how the solution was implemented and the various issues meet on the way. It was an old-fashioned developer war story, and I really enjoyed it. The presentation had plenty of implementation details and set out an approach to introducing serverless into an existing codebase. Well worth watching.
The joy of serverless .net?
This talk by by Matthew Wilson from Instil started with Matt whining about how Microsoft killed his Pappy. Matt once worked on a SharePoint project and has been living with the trauma ever since.
Hold my beer, young’un. I spent 10 years of my life working on SharePoint projects. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve seen software teams labour futilely to build E-commerce websites on SharePoint. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Despite this cliched dig at Microsoft, Matt’s talk was pretty decent. It covers the pain points of using .NET with AWS Lambda functions, and how to improve performance using AOT compilation. It mentioned some useful tooling for .NET on AWS and had a useful developer use case for AI generated code at the end. Again, worth watching.
Slaying Big Data with Serverless Functions: Scaling up with AWS Lambda
Yasmine Rigby, a software engineer at Hamilton Robson, spoke about using AWS Lambda functions when refactoring an IoT solution for improved performance for data visualisation. It was a pretty decent talk, especially coming from a junior engineer. I would have preferred slightly less memes (I suspect Yasmine is unaware of the background of Pepe the frog), and the presentation meandered slightly; the time could have been reduced down to a more reasonable time of 20 minutes (but that is the organisers’ fault). A more experienced presenter would have used some of this time instead for a deep dive into some of the bugs and issues that were experienced on go-live, and fleshed out the future plans part of the talk. Worth a watch!
Honorable mention to
I missed the first 10 minutes of this (short) talk on Local first Serverless from Conor Teer from EverQuote. It was after lunch, the room was incredibly warm, and like quite a few others at the conference, I needed a break. On coming back, I was really intrigued to hear what Conor was saying and kicked myself for missing the first part of his talk. I’m going to catch-up on the talk here.
Overall
This one day conference was decent, but not great. If you check out the agenda, you’ll notice that I’ve not recommended any of the keynote talks, all of which were AI focussed. The 3 keynotes were:
- Simon Wardley discussing Wardley Maps and how these were created, the use of Wardley Maps in busines strategy and then applying them to how AI will impact business and software development. This was a decent talk, given by somebody who is effectively a full time speaker, but at the end of the talk, I was asking myself, what can I actually take away from this? ‘Not much’ was the answer I came up with.
- Patrick Debois discussing the future of AI-Assisted Development, or how software developers are nothing more than AI fodder. He name dropped a lot of AI coding products and services, but he didn’t tell us much about how software development would actually evolve with the use of AI agents, because… he like everyone else doesn’t know. The only worthwhile part of the talk was when he compared the AI aided development to DevOps. DevOps was initially about automation, but over time, became more about preparing for failure. AI coding is initially about generating code; what will it evolve to over time?
- Julian Wood and Ronan Prenting from AWS presenting on The Future with Serverless Super Agents. This was a technical talk about the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an API for GenAI. This was the last session of the day, and I had lost the will to live, so I didn’t pay too much attention. Sorry, guys!
I thought there was just too much focus on AI in the keynotes at the expense of talks that would help the long tail of organisations that are still making their first moves into serverless and cloud development. Interestingly, one of the conference organisers was David Anderson from Liberty IT, who I first heard speak over 15 years ago on TDD when that was the next big thing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
I also thought that some of the conference speakers just weren’t great. There is always some variation in speaker ability, but I think we are still working through the legacy of Covid and the death of many local DEV meetups with the Eventbrite price increases. The pipeline for new technical speakers to grow and develop has been interrupted and I suspect this means there are fewer speakers for the conference organisers to choose from. On the day, there was an announcement about a training day for people on how to answer the call for speakers to local conferences (B-Sides, NIDC). I suspect the conferences may also have to pick up the teaching of basic presenting skills that technical speakers would have previously received giving their first talks to local DEV groups (like offering lightning talks to first time speakers).
I was lucky enough to attend the conference with my employer picking up the bill. If I had attended the conference by paying myself and taking a day off, I would have been a bit disappointed. I’m still very grateful to the conference organisers and all the speakers, and I thought the location (The Titanic Hotel) was great.