Each November in San Francisco, 1,600 senior software engineers and architects transform the Hyatt Regency off Embarcadero into the epicenter of software. QCon San Francisco 2019, the 13th edition of the International Software Conference that visits the Bay Area annually, was no exception. This year’s conference featured 177 speakers, track hosts, workshop presenters, and committee members. These are people like one of the foremost thinkers in the DevOps movement John Willis, CEO/Co-Founder of DarkLang Ellen Chisa, and VP Cloud Architecture Strategy @AWSCloud Adrian Cockcroft. The conference kicked off with an opening keynote from Pat Helland. Pat is the principal software architect at Salesforce where he works on cloud-based, multi-tenant database systems. He is also legend in software when it comes working distributed systems. You may have read some of his past work in the ACM Queue including Immutability Changes Everything, Consistently Eventual, and Identity by Any Other Name. Pat’s QCon San Francisco opening keynote was Mind Your State for Your State of Mind and considered how distinct application patterns have grown over time to leverage different types of distributed stores. The talk concluded with a set of actionable takeaways including "Different applications demand different behaviors from durable state." So ask yourself, "Do you want it right ("read your writes") or do you want it right now (bounded and fast SLA)?" Over the following three days (and the additional two workshop days) there were tracks on building socially conscious software, including Alex Qin’s How Do We Heal?, understanding the software supply chain in today’s containerized world, including GitHub’s Nickolas Means’ Securing Software From the Supply Side and diving into the languages of infrastructure, with talks like Lachlan Evenson’s Helm 3: A Mariner's Delight. A personal highlight of mine came in the track I hosted (Living On The Edge: The World of Edge Compute From Device to Infrastructure Edge). Long time QCon attendee Vasily Vlasov of Netflix’s Cloud Gateway team, gave his first QCon talk, to rave reviews. It earned one of my top five recommendations of day 3. After three intensive days chatting, discussing, and learning from some of today’s leading minds in software, it ended with the perfect closing keynote. Dr Pamela Gay is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute where she’s mapping the surface of celestial objects. She’s part of the team that worked to find where they could land a spacecraft on a 500m wide asteroid tumbling through space. Her talk was about the limitations of AI and how science needs citizen scientists to crowdsource the massive amount of work involved. Her talk (and transcript) is available now on InfoQ. If you haven’t seen it yet, take 45 minutes and prepare to be inspired. As always, some members of InfoQ's team of practitioner-editors were present and wrote a number of posts about the event. Below we've summarized the key takeaways and highlights as blogged and tweeted by attendees. Over the course of the next several months, InfoQ will be publishing the majority of the conference sessions online. QCon San Francisco Key Takeaways This article presents a summary of QCon San Francisco as blogged and tweeted by attendees. Keynotes Microcultures and Finding Your Place by Mike McGarr Mind Your State for Your State of Mind by Pat Helland When Machine Learning Can't Replace the Human by Pamela Gay Tracks & Talks Secrets at Planet-Scale: Engineering the Internal Google KMS by Anvita Pandit Mistakes and Discoveries While Cultivating Ownership by Aaron Blohowiak Passion, Grace, & Fire - The Elements of High Performance by Josh Evans The Focusing Illusion of Developer Productivity by Courtney Hemphill Ethics Landscape by Theo Schlossnagle Automated Testing for Terraform, Docker, Packer, Kubernetes, and More by Yevgeniy Brikman Machine Learning on Mobile and Edge Devices With TensorFlow Lite by Daniel Situnayake Self-Driving Cars as Edge Computing Devices by Matt Ranney Controlled Chaos: Taming Organic, Federated Growth of Microservices by Tobias Kunze Managing Failure Modes in Microservice Architectures by Adrian Cockcroft Stateful Programming Models in Serverless Functions by Chris Gillum User & Device Identity for Microservices @ Netflix Scale by Satyajit Thadeshwar Future of Data Engineering by Chris Riccomini Taming Large State: Lessons From Building Stream Processing by Sonali Sharma, Shriya Arora Optimizing Yourself: Neurodiversity in Tech by Elizabeth Schneider Mapping the Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems by Cat Swetel Observability in the Development Process: Not Just for Ops Anymore by Christine Yen Holistic EdTech & Diversity by Antoine Patton Impact Starts With You by Julia Nguyen Shifting Left with Cloud Native CI/CD by Christie Wilson The Common Pitfalls of Cloud Native Software Supply Chains by Daniel Shapira Exploiting Common iOS Apps’ Vulnerabilities by Ivan Rodriguez Reflecting on a Life Watching Movies and a Career in Security by Jason Chan Security Culture: Why You Need One and How to Create It by Masha Sedova Small Is Beautiful: How to Improve Security by Maintaining Less Code by Natalie Silvanovich 3 Common Pitfalls in Microservice Integration and How to Avoid Them by Niall Deehan Women in Tech & Allies Breakfast (Co-Sponsored by Netflix) by Wade Davis InfoQ produces QCons in 8 cities around the globe (including our newest edition QCon Munich). Our focus on practitioner-driven content is reflected in each committee’s unique make up. The program committee of leading software engineers and leaders meets for 30 weeks to individually select each speaker at QCon. The next QCon is well underway and takes place in London March 2-6, 2020. We will return to San Francisco November 16-20, 2020. QCon San Francisco 2019 Publishing Schedule Check out full videos on InfoQ.com Videos of most presentations were available to attendees within 48 hours of them being filmed, and we have already begun to publish them on the InfoQ site. You can view the publishing schedule on the QCon San Francisco website. There are also numerous QCon photos on our Facebook page. Week of December 23 Mistakes and Discoveries While Cultivating Ownership Aaron Blohowiak Beyond Microservices: Streams, State and Scalability Gwen Shapira Build You Own WebAssembly Compiler Colin Eberhardt Week of December 30 Mapping the Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems Cat Swetel Holistic EdTech & Diversity Antoine Patton Practical Change Data Streaming Use Cases With Apache Kafka & Debezium Gunnar Morling Optimizing Yourself: Neurodiversity in Tech Elizabeth Schneider Security Culture: Why You Need One and How to Create It Masha Sedova |
Next QCon Join us at QCon London March 2-6, 2020 The 14th QCon London is a 3-day conference + 2 workshop days with over 140 talks in many different tracks and topics, that allows developers to discover what they don’t know ... but should know in software development. Architectures from Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter; Kubernetes and Cloud Architectures; Building High Performing Teams; Next Generation Microservices; The Latest Innovations in Machine Learning, Streaming Data Architectures, JavaScript: Pushing the Client Beyond the Browser, are just some of the tracks for this year’s conference. Early bird pricing ends Jan 24th! Save £395 when you use “INFOQ20”! |
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