TeckTalks launch in review: Insightful talks, top tech tips, and upskilling for the community

Last week we launched our very first TeckTalks – a networking and knowledge sharing event for our associates and the technology community at large.

We hosted a group of familiar and new faces at a scenic London riverside venue, treating our guests to dinner, drinks, and a trio of talks from a set of fantastic speakers. We heard from our very own Head of Engagement on today’s state of enterprise cloud, from our customer at TUI on replatforming their website, and from one of our associates on building successful platforms for large organisations.

Read on to find our speakers’ top tips, access useful links to resources, and be inspired to join us for TeckTalks #2!

Talks

Driving industrialised cloud adoption at the enterprise level: James Cull, Head of Engagement, Tecknuovo

James opened with a deep dive on strategies for driving industrialised cloud adoption at the enterprise level. With 10 years’ technology consulting experience and certifications in AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud, James gave his expert insight on why cloud adoption is on a rampant rise in 2022.

More importantly, he delved into the barriers to cloud adoption — think on-prem mindsets and lacking technical expertise — and how enterprises can work around them to design a cloud journey that delivers on their business objectives.

The spike in cloud adoption is creating exciting upskilling opportunities for the tech community too. So to close out his talk, James shared his favourite resources for training in cloud environments, getting certified with cloud providers, and honing your skills in architecture security, DevOps and more. Head to Quiklabs or Microsoft Learn to get onboard!

Replatforming a global travel company’s ecommerce function: Emily Collier, Technology Director, TUI

Emily is working with Tecknuovo to replatform the travel giant’s ecommerce function.

She’s working in a complex ecommerce environment spanning multiple markets, brands, languages, channels, devices and currencies. She let us in on her strategy to replace the aging technology with a modularised technology ecosystem that will form the backbone of the transformation.

It draws on continuous delivery, cloud-native architecture, highly agile ways of working, and lightweight micofrontends. This is creating an efficient platform that’s helping massively boost the site’s Search Engine Optimisation and User Experience.

We were fascinated to learn how Emily’s work is helping TUI towards its goal to be the world’s leading travel and experience marketplace by creating personalised experiences, optimising them across channels, and delighting customers in the process.

We were also excited about the allusion to a special TeckTalks discount code for our next holiday. You might just catch us in the Maldives next month!

Building high-performance platforms for large organisations: Aurimas Mickevicius, Platform Lead, Tecknuovo

Our final speaker was one of Tecknuovo’s talented community of associates. A certified Kubernetes administrator, AWS DevOps professional and GCP professional cloud architect, Aurimas specialises in building large-scale public cloud platforms and containerised workloads on public clouds.

He framed his talk by setting out the challenges that crop up when teams build solutions on segregated platforms. Namely that you end up with an abundance of platforms custom-built just for that team’s product.

The result? Duplicated and overlapping work from multiple product teams reinventing solutions to the same problem. Aurimas outlined why this doesn’t only create inconsistent outcomes, but also massive risks to compliance and security stemming from each platform’s slightly different build.

No organisation can afford to take that risk to their reputation, resources, and brain power. Aurimas explained why the most cost-effective, productive and secure solution is to standardise processes and share information freely across teams and platforms.

He explained why platforms should be the self-help destination for product teams to access APIs, tools, services, knowledge. And he closed out his talk by sharing his personal top tips for building a successful platform:

1. Create a long-term vision
2. Include security architecture from day one
3. Establish communication channels
4. Learn how to sell the platform
5. Get user feedback

Read more from Aurimas in his Medium blog

The first of many TeckTalks

We had a fantastic evening with our guests and speakers, and we’re already looking forward to TeckTalks #2!

It’s happening on 1st December 2022, and will be all about data. Expect to learn about the most talked-about data challenges for 2023 and beyond, which tools and hacks leading experts are using to solve them, and how you can upskill and get up to speed.

In the meanwhile, you can uncover insights from our team and associates on What we think.