GOTO Night: Understanding Progressive Collapse w/ Sam Newman

Date: September 28, 2026
Time: 17:30 - 20:00
Location: Philip Heymans Alle 15, 2900 Hellerup, Denmark

Agenda

17:30 - Doors open
18:00 - Talk by Sam Newman, Understanding Progressive Collapse
18:45 - Networking
20:00 - Thank you for today

Talk description

Small things going wrong can quickly snowball. The cascading failure is often a nightmare scenario for any system. An initial problem, which in isolation seems like such a minor problem, can kick off a chain reaction of ever-increasing failures, potentially leading to catastrophic results.

When a failure of a single component results in the failure of other connected elements, this is known as a progressive collapse. In this talk, Sam Newman looks at this phenomenon in more detail, and he'll examine how it has manifested in major disasters. Based on lessons learned from other industries, Sam will share three key techniques that can be used to mitigate against the progressive collapse occurring in your own system.

This talk will help you understand how to architect your systems in such a way that small failures stay small.

About the speaker

Sam Newman is an independent consultant specializing in helping people ship software fast. Sam has worked extensively with the cloud, continuous delivery and microservices and is especially preoccupied with understanding how to more easily deploy working software into production.

For the last few years, he’s been focused on microservice architectures. Sam worked with a variety of companies around the world, often with one foot in the developer world and another in the IT operations space. Previously, has spent over a decade at ThoughtWorks before leaving for a startup, and then eventually setting up his own company. Sam is a frequent speaker at conferences and author of best-selling books.