This talk is a real-world war story about what happens when an online petition system suddenly has to survive a large-scale democracy event. Stefan Behte takes you through the moment a customer asks for the impossible: increasing the systems throughput to handle over 100,000 simultaneous votes. This turned into a journey through the system’s weak spots: slow publication, millions of opt-in mails, confusing workflows, and a system that was never meant for that kind of parallel load. We’ll explores some of the intended fixes like throwing more hardware at the problem, moving to the cloud, or bolting on a queueing system and will present our solution. But the real questions remains: will the modified system survive the event?

Software engineering is huge. Some of us flash firmware onto microcontrollers, some train AI models, some wrestle with CSS, and some break into systems for a living. We all go deep in our own corner, and we all end up in our own bubble.

Show and Tell is here to pop it. Take the stage for up to 4 minutes and show us what you’re into right now. That could be the tool you found last week and can’t stop playing with, the side project you hack on at night, the bug that taught you something, or the idea that changed how you work.

You don’t need slides or practice. There’s a laptop on stage, so open a browser, pull up an image, or just tell a story. Rough edges are welcome. The only goal is to give the room a look into your world and maybe spark an idea for someone else.