Faris Aziz

Staff Software Engineer @ Smallpdf

Engineering Without a Safety Net: Where It Works and Where It Hurts

Testing, monitoring, observability. They’re rarely urgent, often skipped, and easy to dismiss when things are moving fast. But what’s the real cost of deferring them, and how much can you actually get away with?

This talk explores the tradeoffs of skipping traditional engineering practices in the name of speed, and what happens when you try to layer them in after a system has already scaled. It’s not about dogma or checklists, it’s about pragmatism, risk, and timing.

Bio

Faris is an experienced engineer, international conference speaker, and workshop instructor with a focus on React, Next.js, web architecture, and resilient system design. He has a strong interest in startups, having worked at early-stage companies in roles ranging from founding teams to scaling organizations from 1 to 100 people. His expertise includes engineering leadership, designing career ladders from scratch, and managing teams of over 10 engineers. As a front-end subject matter expert, Faris has built systems used by millions of users. His work spans greenfield projects and long-running products. He has worked in industries including Connected TV, Fintech, SaaS, and Fitness, with companies such as Smallpdf, Fiit, Discovery, GCN, Eurosport, and Navro (formerly Paytrix). Faris focuses on building user-centric, performant, and maintainable applications. He takes a particular interest in observability and monitoring, making systems easier to debug and improve. He shares his knowledge by organizing the Zurich.js meetup in Switzerland and speaking at international conferences on web development, engineering leadership, and scalable systems. In his spare time, Faris contributes to developer tools like Raycast and reflects on questions like why the build works on his machine but fails everywhere else.