DevDays: a stage for the IT teams and their IT cases

Sharing knowledge and experience in order to do an even better job, and discovering new ideas: this is what the internal PostFinance DevDays are about, but that’s not all. “With the DevDays, we also want to get people talking, not just the different developer teams, and to give the teams a face” says Luana Cusseddu, PaaS System Engineer, who co-organizes the event. Additionally, the DevDays could in future also be used as a training platform for sharing the expertise Postfinance has accumulated in areas such as software development, system engineering and operations with the outside world. “But it’s such a shame that our industry colleagues outside of PostFinance have no idea about the exciting projects we’re working on in our IT department, the new technologies we’re using or how we work together,” she explains. By making appearances at tech conferences and meet-ups, we hope to change this, and in doing so seize the opportunity to try and persuade new IT specialists to join us.

Stories from everyday IT life also have a place here

For the three organizers, it’s important that the DevDays not only offer participants a chance to talk about specialist fields such as engineering, architecture and technology, but also an opportunity to exchange stories and experience from everyday IT life for real use cases. At the most recent DevDays on 7 September 2022, System Engineer for Middleware and Observability and co-organizer Roger Brechbühl touched on what was a highly topical case at the time. He invited two employees from IT operations to discuss their experiences of a recent IT incident and how they approached it. “Our colleagues described how challenging it is to look for the causes of a problem when you’re on-call and your heart is racing,” says Brechbühl The talk also highlighted methods that might help solve these sorts of problems, for instance tracing with open telemetry, which can be used to monitor processes on an ongoing basis and to pinpoint the causes of faults faster.

There are still so many good IT cases and stories

Other talks focused on new technologies For instance, one talk used an example to present the deployment strategy Blue Green Deployment, which itself uses GitLab and Argo CD, while another presented a self-service that uses the programming language Go. Roger Brechbühl is in no doubt that there are many other stories from the field of IT that are yet to be told that would create the “aha effect”. Exciting ideas on how to solve a current deployment problem, or accounts of a typical day of operations on 24 December are just as welcome at the DevDays as progress reports detailing the migration process to a new piece of technology, or the use of a bold piece of architecture to implement a technical feature. There is even more of this to come at the next DevDays!

Are you also keen to work in IT at PostFinance?

Getting to grips with new technologies, working on your own initiative, knowing that you are trusted to make decisions, the atmosphere in the team, and so on: there are all sorts of things that Luana Cusseddu likes about working in IT at PostFinance. Are you also looking to bring your own IT expertise to this lively, modern and open working environment and to make progress together with us?