Track Overview

Modern CS in the Real World

Many of us went to school, spent countless hours learning theory, and breathed a sigh of relief when we finally graduated and entered the work force. It meant that we could build real systems and software and worry less about math and proofs. However, the exploding popularity of the internet and of mobile devices means that our systems need to handle tremendous load, 24-7, across the world and across changes and outages. These needs resulted in a budding collaboration between industry and academia in several areas including but not limited to Databases, AI, ML, Distributed Systems, Information Theory, Control Systems, Probability and Data Mining. What are some of these advances and which ones should you know more about? Come to this track to learn more.


From this track

SESSION + Live Q&A Database Design

Infinite Parallel Universes: State at the Edge

Databases and other systems of state often rely on abstractions that break down at large physical scale. In this talk I'll describe the problems with some of these traditional assumptions, and suggest better approaches for effectively managing data in geographically large networks. With...

Peter Bourgon

Principal Engineer @fastly

SESSION + Live Q&A Serverless

Cloudstate—Towards Stateful Serverless

Serverless experience is revolutionary and will grow to dominate the future of Cloud. Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) however—with its ephemeral, stateless, and short-lived functions—is only the first step. FaaS is great for processing-intensive, parallelizable workloads, moving data...

Sean Walsh

Field CTO @Lightbend

SESSION + Live Q&A Debugging

Record, Replay, Rinse, & Repeat: Easily Rebuilding Programmatic State

Join this talk to learn about the various implementations of record and replay systems that can be used to debug software applications. The talk begins with a discussion of the current state of the art, from both academia and the real world. We then provide an overview of the pros and cons,...

Greg Law

Co-founder & CTO @undo_io

SESSION + Live Q&A Apache Kafka

Kafka: a Modern Distributed System

You may have heard that Apache Kafka plays a central role in modern event-driven architectures. It lies at the heart of successful microservices implementations -- its loyal following is well versed in Kafka's key APIs: the Producer and Consumer, Kafka Streams, and maybe even KSQL. But have...

Tim Berglund

Senior Director of Developer Experience @Confluent

SESSION + Live Q&A Silicon Valley

Applying AI/ML for Trusted Commerce Connections @Facebook Marketplace

Facebook Marketplace is aimed at making buying and selling seamless for people locally within their communities and open up economic opportunity through social commerce. Given that Trust is a key driver of consumer decisions in Commerce, it is important for Facebook to build trust amongst buyers...

Liza Fireman

Engineering Manager @Facebook Marketplace Trust & Safety

SESSION + Live Q&A Interview Available

Coccinelle: 10 Years of Automated Evolution in the Linux Kernel

Over the last 10+ years, we have been developing the Coccinelle C-program matching and transformation tool. Coccinelle allows developers to match and transform C code via a generalization of the familiar patch syntax. As Coccinelle is independent of the C preprocessor, Coccinelle rules can be...

Julia Lawall

Senior Researcher @Inria


Speakers from this track

Peter Bourgon

Principal Engineer @fastly

Peter is a distributed systems expert and strong believer in coördination-free architectures. He's the author of Go kit, the preëminent toolkit for microservices in Go; and several large-scale coördination-avoiding distributed systems, including Roshi (stream index) and OK Log (log...

Read more
Find Peter Bourgon at:

Sean Walsh

Field CTO @Lightbend

Sean Walsh is Field CTO at Lightbend, and a 20 year veteran of IT and has previously held various leadership roles in the tech industry. Sean is a distributed systems expert and has applied this expertise in the energy, financial and wellness industries, among others. Sean pioneered patterns for...

Read more

Greg Law

Co-founder & CTO @undo_io

Greg is co-founder and CTO at Undo. He likes writing system software to make computers do things that are supposed not to be able to do.  Greg has 20 years’ experience in the software industry and has held development and management roles at companies including the pioneering...

Read more

Tim Berglund

Senior Director of Developer Experience @Confluent

Tim is a teacher, author, and technology leader with Confluent, where he serves as the Senior Director of Developer Experience. He can frequently be found at speaking at conferences in the United States and all over the world. He is the co-presenter of various O’Reilly training videos on...

Read more

Liza Fireman

Engineering Manager @Facebook Marketplace Trust & Safety

Liza is an Engineering Manager of the Marketplace Integrity and Payment Risks teams. She has more than 20 years of engineering experience building backend, ML and user-facing products. Prior to Facebook, she spent 6 years in engineering management roles at Google, including leading the innovative...

Read more

Julia Lawall

Senior Researcher @Inria

Julia Lawall is a Senior Research Scientist at Inria. Her research is at the intersection of programming languages and operating systems. She develops the tool Coccinelle and has over 2000 patches in the Linux kernel based on this work.

Read more

Track Host

Sid Anand

Hacker at Large, Co-chair @QCon & Data Council, PMC & Committer @ApacheAirflow

Sid Anand recently served as PayPal's Chief Data Engineer, focusing on ways to realize the value of data. Prior to joining PayPal, he held several positions including Agari's Data Architect, a Technical Lead in Search & Data Analytics @ LinkedIn, Netflix’s Cloud Data Architect,...

Read more
Find Sid Anand at:

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.