My Takeaway, as cited on the
QConSF 2015 site:
"The confluence of diverse backgrounds, technologies, and business segments represented by a global breadth of attendees - merges into a synthesis of pure enthusiasm that provides one-and- all an opportunity to pause in our day-to-day professional challenges, and lift our heads up for a moment and embrace the realization that there are people doing extraordinary things in our industry - and as their knowledge is willingly shared - new plateaus of achievement are now within our own grasp."
Tonight I returned from my 4th
http://qconsf.com - and have much to share.
The venue at the
Hyatt Regency was excellent
I met some very interesting people on this trip - from many different countries - including: Italy, Australia, Belarus, Romania, India, England, Russia, Lebanon, and China.
I arrived on Sunday - and was able to meet up with three fellow attendees for drinks and dinner at
The Chaya - an excellent Asian/Japanese Fusion style restaurant.
I will touch on just some of the more noteworthy sessions I attended this week...to give you a flavor of the content that might appeal to someone likewise interested in the distributed architecture problem space.
Bill Buxton (Principal Researcher at Microsoft) gave an interesting talk on Monday morning's keynote:
Avoiding The Big Crash.
I intended to attend as many of the sessions in the
Architectures You've Always Wondered About track on Monday - but found myself often stepping out so as not to miss some very interesting sessions I note below.
My favorite session of the entire conference was given by Zhuoran Zhuang and Zhao Xu, who gave a phenomenally detailed presentation entitled
Alibaba Mobile Infrastructure at "China Scale"
I also enjoyed the talk given by Erran Berger (Senior Director of Engineering at LinkedIn)
LinkedIn's Active/Active Evolution
My keen interest in the Go Language sessions led me to frequently drop in on in the
Modern Languages in Practice track
For example:
- Rick Hudson (Engineer at Google) did a session on Go GC: Prioritizing Low Latency and Simplicity. Surprisingly there is only one 'knob' to turn with regards to Go GC. Rick hinted at some changes that are coming in Go 1.6 - which I need to research more.
On Tuesday, I spent time in the
Containers in Practice track, and found these three sessions to be very notable:
I also managed to include a talk given by Fangjin Yang's (co-founder of @Imply)
Architecting Distributed Databases for Failure - in the
Architecting for Failure track
On Wednesday, I particularly enjoyed the talk given by Jason Brown (an Apache Cassandra Core Committer)
Hell is...other nodes - in the
Taming Distributed Architectures track.
Making the time to step away from day-to-day responsibilities is never easy. But the investment I have made in making the commitment to attend QConSF has paid off in so many ways: Ideas, insights, specific case studies that can be cited, bread crumbs of knowledge that give me the beginning of the trail to discovery, industry connections...and yes, not to be forgotten or marginalized...a renewed sense of enthusiasm for my profession.
Some additional links I picked-up from some twitter activity that may be of interest to others:
Brendan Gregg's Linux Performance page
www.brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html
So We Hear You Like Papers talk by Ines Sombra - Distributed Systems Engineer at @Fastly, and Caitie McCaffrey - Tech Lead of Observability at Twitter
https://github.com/Randommood/QConSF2015
