Events
Date 29 June 2026
As previously blogged about, Thomas Barns of Capacitas is presenting at Velocity Conference in London on 19th October, along with John Pillar, (currently Group Head of Software Engineering at Arcadia, and previously at M&S.com and ASOS)
The title of John and Thomas’s talk is “Continuous Performance Engineering? How to move fast and not break things.”
Velocity Conference is a must-attend event for anyone building and maintaining complex distributed systems.
If you have not already signed up, you can do so here, and make sure you use the code Capacitas30 to get a 30% discount!
We look forward to seeing you there!
By combining John Pillar's profound experience as a Retail Transformation Evangelist with multiple leading retailers, and the deep technology expertise of Thomas Barns and Capacitas, the presentation will cover these topics with a unique depth and insight.
This presentation takes you through our journey to implement an agile performance engineering strategy suitable for continuous development practices. We start by looking at what performance is – and it’s much more than simply page load times. There’s a need to consider factors such as stability and scalability as well.
We then cover the following key areas
- Managing risk and prioritising intervention from the beginning of the change lifecycle
- Bringing together expertise from developers and performance analysts to drive smarter engineering
- Building load testing into the pipeline and the challenges faced
- How we automated performance analysis to pick up the real underlying problems
- Residual risks and approaches we use for dealing with them
The Speakers
Thomas Barns, Capacitas
Thomas Barns is Risk Modelling and Performance Engineering service lead at Capacitas, responsible for service definition and ensuring consistent best practice across projects. Over the past 10 years he has worked on large projects providing capacity and performance expertise to clients and also owned the roadmap for developing Capacitas’ technical software solutions
John Pillar, Arcadia
John Pillar is a technology leader and evangelist with a passion for driving digital innovation and transformation. He has spent the past 19 years in e-commerce building, transforming and leading technology teams to win various awards, including the Retail Week technology award and Retail Week’s IT Team of the Year. Those teams have ranged from small to large multi-disciplined teams working on global multichannel platforms.
About the author
Team Capacitas
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In today’s cloud-native environments, resilience is not optional—it’s critical. Chaos testing has emerged as a key practice for validating system behaviour under failure conditions.
