Performance Engineering Meetup #8

About this event

Dive into real-world insights, best practices and hands-on strategies for optimizing software performance! Event Overview 🚀 Performance Engineering Community invites you to the 8th Performance Engineering Meetup, continuing our series of practical, experience-driven discussions on modern performance engineering. 📊 This edition explores how the discipline is evolving, from understanding what production metrics really tell us about system behavior to applying AI-assisted analysis in performance investigations. Through real-world examples, our speakers will share lessons learned, common pitfalls, and practical techniques that engineers can apply in their own environments. 🤝 Whether you're focused on monitoring, load testing, troubleshooting, or automation, this meetup offers insights into how data and AI are reshaping the way we approach performance engineering. Agenda 👨‍🏫 18:00 – 📊 Performance Monitoring: Why Average Latency Lies and What Metrics Don't Tell You About Your System by Krzysztof Michalak (XTB) Your dashboard looks green. Average latency seems fine. CPU usage isn't a concern. Yet users still complain that the application feels slow. Why? This session explores why average latency can be one of the most misleading performance indicators and what it often hides. Krzysztof will discuss percentile-based analysis (p95, p99, p99.9), tail latency, coordinated omission, and other measurement challenges that can distort how we interpret system behavior. 👨‍🏫 19:00 – 🤖 Can AI Run Your Performance Tests? by Aodan O'Sullivan (Sabre) & Kacper Wilim (Sabre) AI can generate test plans, suggest workloads, analyze performance data, and identify potential root causes. However, it can also produce misleading conclusions when used without appropriate context and validation. Drawing on real performance investigations, Aodan will share where AI delivered value, where it fell short, and what guardrails are needed. Kacper Wilim will then demonstrate how these lessons were incorporated into a standardized and increasingly automated workflow. Meet the Speakers 📊 Krzysztof Michalak Senior Software Engineer at XTB, where he is helping build a real-time options trading platform from the ground up. With over six years of backend engineering experience, he specializes in high-performance, low-latency systems and is passionate about understanding how software behaves under real-world load. 🤖 Aodan O'Sullivan Senior Performance Engineering leader at Sabre with more than 25 years of experience in performance engineering and nearly 18 years with the company. Aodan has led performance initiatives across large-scale distributed systems and is passionate about sharing practical engineering knowledge, mentoring others, and exploring how AI can support engineering investigations and decision-making. ⚙️ Kacper Wilim Performance Engineer at Sabre, focused on modernizing performance engineering practices through automation, data-driven analysis, and AI-assisted workflows. Kacper works on standardizing performance testing processes and building solutions that help engineers identify and resolve performance issues more efficiently. About the Performance Engineering Community We are a community-driven initiative powered by Sabre, SII, Pega, Allegro, XTB and commercetools. Our mission? Bringing engineers together to share knowledge, exchange experiences, and connect. But it’s not just about tech - it’s about people too. That’s why we make sure our meetups have a great vibe, with plenty of opportunities to chat, network, and just have a good time! Photos may be taken during the event and published on the social networks and websites of SII, Sabre, Pega, Allegro, and XTB for promotional and marketing purposes. Your participation will be understood as consent to the dissemination of your image. The email address you provide during registration will be stored and used to communicate with you about future events and related initiatives.