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What if failure made your systems stronger? Join Dev Korea #9 for a practical talk on antifragile software, plus food, networking, and good company in Seoul.

Dev Korea #9

이 이벤트는 한국어로도 제공됩니다.한국어로 읽기 →

🎉 Interested in sponsoring this event? As a sponsor, your company gets visibility on the event page, social media posts, uploaded talk video, event recap article, and a short speaking slot during the event to introduce your company. Email me at florian@dev-korea.com, DM me on LinkedIn or on X.

Join us for another evening of great talks and good company! It's the perfect chance to connect, meet new people. Can't wait to see you there!

📸 By attending, you consent to being photographed/filmed. Photos and videos will be shared by Dev Korea on social media and promotional materials. Let us know at check-in if you'd prefer not to appear.

Don't worry about perfect English! We welcome everyone, and many attendees speak Korean too. Come as you are, let's learn and connect together! 🇰🇷

Schedule:

  • 6:30pm - 7:00pm: Check-in + Food
  • 7:00pm - 7:05pm: Introduction
  • 7:05pm - 8:05pm: Jan de Vries - Beyond resilience: Architecting antifragile systems
  • 8:05pm - 8:10pm: Community updates + Conclusion
  • 8:10pm - 9:15pm: Networking + Closing

Beyond resilience: Architecting antifragile systems Most of us build systems to be robust or resilient. We want them to resist failure or to recover from failure. But in today's turbulent world chaos is inevitable. What if your system didn't just survive a spike in latency or a server crash, but actually got better because of it?

The concept of Antifragility, coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is the hidden engine behind modern engineering triumphs like chaos engineering, continuous deployment, canary releases and microservices. While a resilient system recovers from shocks and stays the same, an antifragile system thrives on disorder, using failures as a catalyst for growth.

In this session, we'll move beyond the theory and look at the hidden force shaping our industry. We will explore how to transition from fragile architectures (where one error causes a cascade) to systems that leverage randomness to improve.

Don't just build systems that don't break. Build systems that get stronger when they do.

Key learnings The Fragility Spectrum: How to identify fragile, robust, resilient, and antifragile patterns in your current stack.

Architectural Optionality: Why microservices and a Best of Breed Strategy are actually bets on antifragility, allowing you to swap components without system-wide failure.

Turning Bugs into Features: Practical ways to use Chaos Engineering and Continuous Experimentation to force your system to evolve through "controlled volatility."

Organizational Measures as Foundation: Why reducing organizational debt, Decentralized Decision-Making, and ensuring Skin in the Game (DevOps) are just as important as technical ones.

The Error Budget as an Evolutionary Pressure: Shifting from "failure avoidance" to treating errors as a currency for innovation. If you aren't hitting your budget, you aren't learning fast enough.

Small-Scale Volatility vs. Black Swans: Understanding how suppressing minor fluctuations (via manual overrides) actually increases the risk of a catastrophic system collapse.

Via Negativa (The Power of Subtraction): Identifying that the most "antifragile" move is often removing a feature, a dependency, or a layer of complexity to reduce Technical Debt.

The Barbell Strategy in Engineering: How to balance a hyper-stable, "boring" core (90%) with high-risk, high-reward experimentation like A/B Testing and Canary Releases (10%).

Cognitive Redundancy via T-Shaped Profiles: Why cross-functional skills are the ultimate defense against the "Bus Factor" and silo-driven fragility.

Focus on MTTR over MTBF: Why optimizing for "Mean Time To Recovery" creates a more adaptive system than trying to make "Mean Time Between Failures" infinite.

About Jan Jan de Vries is a senior trainer, business IT consultant, coach, researcher and public speaker in the fields of Agile, DevOps, Business Information Management, Service Management, Antifragility and Strategy Development.

He founded:

  • BlueOceanRecon.com to facilitate the development of Blue Oceans and Lean Startups.
  • Antifragility.works to conduct research on the practical application of antifragility in organisations.

In the last 3 years he has delivered antifragility presentations at conferences in Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Czech Republic, Australia, Japan, Malaysia and Canada.

What is Dev Korea? We are a community dedicated to building a fair, transparent tech ecosystem in Korea. Dev Korea connects English-speaking developers, entrepreneurs, and tech professionals through networking events, job opportunities, and knowledge sharing. Our mission is to foster collaboration and growth within Korea's international tech scene.

What is Dev Korea? We are a community dedicated to building a fair, transparent tech ecosystem in Korea. Dev Korea connects English-speaking developers, entrepreneurs, and tech professionals through networking events, job opportunities, and knowledge sharing. Our mission is to foster collaboration and growth within Korea's international tech scene.

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Don't miss out on this opportunity to connect with fellow developers and learn from some of the best in the industry.

Note: This event will be conducted primarily in English, but Korean speakers are very welcome!