Martin Larsen: Technology talks with real value

About me

I am a 40 year old Product Manager and Software Developer with primary focus on building scalable cloud applications. I started building dynamic web applications at the age of 18, finished my Master of Science from the IT University of Copenhagen in 2007, and have since then had 13 years full time experience building web applications on SOA architecture. During the last 9 years, I have undertaken one of the leading developer roles in the Danish startup Queue-it, where we have designed and built a highly scalable, fault-tolerant web application on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

My desire to do public speaking comes from an urge to pay back some of the technical depth I have gained over the years from the community. I am, to a high degree, self tought and I enjoy exploring new features and frameworks which would not be possible without support from an active community of other developers with an urge to share some of their experience.

I live in Denmark (Scandinavia/Europe) and speak English as well as Danish.

Talks

Talks with real value are about giving insight into technical topics based on real experience. In these talks, attendees will leave energized and equipped for solving real world issues that they may be faced with in their day-to-day work. Talks will be hands-on and include live coding and demos - they are not song-and-dance shows.

These talks are well suited for e.g. development conferences, member organizations and user-groups. The following talks are reference talks, which can be tailored and catered for your audience. Please contact me for details.

Talks are primarily given in Denmark but can be given around the world upon request. The language is English or Danish

Amazon Web Services

During the last 9+ years, I have gained a deep knowledge and practical experience in designing, building and running a large SaaS application in the AWS cloud. This talk will be based on this experience and can either be an introduction to writing and deploying a .Net web application on AWS or a deep dive into specific AWS services such as EC2 or DynamoDB.

Microservices

Jumping all in on Microservices is very appealing for us developers. We dream of the day when all of our systems will be nicely decoupled and independent. When riding the hype we often choose not to talk about the trade-offs, but neglecting to do so can have great consequences, and one day we wake up to reality. Still, there are good reasons why to pursue a Microservice architecture, and at Queue-it that is what we have done.

Lean Startup Warstories

This talk is a reflection of my time at Queue-it, and how we build an application from nothing to a being a success that has served more than 600 million end users. The success of Queue-it is partly caused by a lean development methodology that enables fast learning and delivery. Among other thing I will dive into Lean Startup, Kanban and continuous delivery to explain the road taken.

Scaling SaaS

How do you design and build an applications that can handle 500.000+ concurrent users? This talk will try to answer that question by looking at some low level components as well as some higher level architectural design patterns. I will be discussing why it is vital to design for failure and for success - and what exactly that means.

Upcoming Talks

When		What	Where
No upcoming talks

Recent Talks

	What	Where
February 19, 2019	Let's build a serverless data stream	AWS Community Day
April 29, 2019	Architecture at Queue-it	IT University of Copenhagen
November 19, 2018	Architecture at Queue-it	IT University of Copenhagen
September 25, 2018	Microservices	Prosa Copenhagen
May 14, 2018	Why you should never build Microservices - and why we do it anyway	MicroCPH
May 10, 2018	Why you should never build Microservices - and why we do it anyway	NDC Minnesota
September 6, 2017	Serverless applikationer	Prosa Copenhagen
August 24, 2017	Towards a Micro Service architecture	CODE Odense
Marts 21, 2017	Mocking and dependency injection	Prosa Copenhagen
January 24, 2017	Big Data with Lambda: Redshift Loader	Copenhagen AWS User Group
January 23, 2017	Serverless on Amazon Web Services	CODE Odense
November 15, 2016	Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services	Prosa Copenhagen
November 15, 2016	Lean Startup War Stories from Queue-it	The Camp
August 31, 2016	Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services	Prosa Odense
Marts 9, 2016	Lean Startup Warstories	Prosa København
May 28, 2015	Kanban War Stories from a SaaS start-up	Scrum Day 2015
March 24, 2015	Aspect Oriented Programming	Odense .Net User Group
November 4, 2014	Introducing Amazon Web Services	Odense .Net User Group

Blogs

Servers, Containers or Serverless?

As microservices architecture is gaining popularity and is becoming the favorite software development technique for large-scale applications, cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are offering multiple technologies to host your services. However, on the journey towards microservices, it quickly becomes clear that things that used to be relatively simple in a monolith, become complex – deployment, monitoring, logging, communication between processes and availability, just to name a few.

Less Painful, Almost Free, Web Load Testing

Web application load testing has historically been expensive and hard. Software from commercial vendors costs thousands of US dollars, and buying equipment and maintaining it will cost you even more. The software is often complex, and the learning curve is steep. This process is so painful that it is often skipped, but load testing is an important step that will help you identify issues in your software that will not show up in your functional tests.

Top ways to build performance into your web application

At Queue-it, we have hosted thousands of queues, protecting websites from end user peaks, and we have seen a lot of websites that were not able to handle the pressure from the thousands of concurrent users. Some of these websites have been poorly designed and built, while others, after spending millions on performance, still cannot handle the demand.

Why you should design for failure AND success

Downtime is poison for most SaaS services. Many online services have learned the hard way that customers will not easily forgive service downtime. This is especially true at Queue-it. We exist to protect our customers at the most business critical times – if our service is down at these times, it becomes useless and could put our customers in a situation that is worse than if they didn’t use our service. Downtime is fatal at Queue-it.

How we work with the Lean Startup Methodology

Curious how Queue-it developers handle the startup process? Software development in a startup is about a trial-and-error approach that focuses on learning from everything you do (whether it works or doesn't), building upon that, and focusing your energy to reach your maximum potential. I have been with Queue-it from the beginning as the first developer on the team, and I have seen the product, team and company grow. Here is what I have learned.

Get in touch

[email protected]

prearrangedchaos

+45 30 49 29 97

profile

realvaluetalks