Questioning Convention: C# as a Shortcut to Startup Velocity

Abstract

Are you considering founding a startup? What stack would you use? Would you take a bet on a programming language you've never used professionally before? When building a company from scratch, these aren’t just theoretical questions – they’re make-or-break decisions with real consequences.

In a situation where conventional wisdom might point to Golang, TypeScript or Python; Tracebit took a different - and potentially surprising - path by building in C#.

Sam, the CTO & Co-founder of Tracebit, will explore the rationale behind this decision and why it’s been pivotal in enabling a small team to punch above their weight to win discerning enterprise customers in a competitive cybersecurity market. He’ll tell the zero-to-one story of solo-engineering an MVP, landing our first enterprise customer, and growing a high-performing team through practical, in-the-trenches examples of how C# allows you to do more with less while scale increases and runway decreases.

Whether you're launching a new venture or an engineering leader weighing technical tradeoffs, this session offers actionable insights for making technology decisions that serve both immediate needs and long-term vision – and how questioning the consensus about programming languages might be the strategic advantage you've been overlooking.


Speaker

Sam Cox

Co-Founder & CTO @Tracebit, Building Security Canaries at Scale

Sam is the CTO & Co-founder of Tracebit where he’s building and scaling systems to automate the use of cloud-native infrastructure as Security Canaries to detect intrusions and insider risk in cloud environments.

Sam has spent over a decade designing and building critical software systems at scale, previously at Tessian where he architected resilient systems to handle high-volume email traffic for some of the world’s largest enterprises using a shuffle-sharded, cell-based design.

Sam has previously presented cloud security research at fwd:cloudsec, revealing a now-patched technique to uncover the AWS account ID of private S3 buckets.

Read more
Find Sam Cox at:

Date

Tuesday Apr 8 / 10:35AM BST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Windsor (5th Fl.)

Topics

Startup C# .net security

Share

From the same track

Session services

Expanding Swift from Apps to Services

Tuesday Apr 8 / 11:45AM BST

The Swift programming language is a popular choice for applications, but many engineers are less familiar with Swift’s capabilities for writing services. This session will explore why Swift is a great fit for services development, from memory safety to interoperability with other languages.

Speaker image - Cory Benfield

Cory Benfield

Senior Software Engineer Doing Swift on Server @Apple

Session WASM

WASM in the Enterprise: Secure, Portable, and Ready for Business

Tuesday Apr 8 / 01:35PM BST

WebAssembly (WASM) is emerging as a powerful tool beyond its browser origins, enabling safer, more flexible, and more efficient execution across a wide range of enterprise applications.In this session, we’ll take a hands-on look at real-world use cases, including:

Speaker image - Andrea Peruffo

Andrea Peruffo

Open Source Addicted Software Developer @RedHat, Passionate About Distributed Systems, Compilers, Infrastructure and Everything In Between

Session WebAssembly

How WebAssembly Components Enable Safe and Portable Software Extensions

Tuesday Apr 8 / 02:45PM BST

Application extensions are an essential part of any software ecosystem. While Rust is a great language, its lack of a standard ABI means that the whole source code has to be available to the compiler.

Speaker image - Alex Radovici

Alex Radovici

Operating Systems & Compilers PhD, Author of "Getting Started with Secure Embedded Systems" and Core Contributor of Tock OS

Session

WASM Components are a FaaS' Best Friend

Tuesday Apr 8 / 05:05PM BST

Why would you build your own Function as a Service platform and what does a FaaS architecture look like? Building something that can scale to zero, work with your existing systems, stay secure, and handle different workloads isn’t easy.

Speaker image - Laurent Doguin

Laurent Doguin

Director Developer Relations & Strategy @couchbase, Previously Developer Advocate @Clever Cloud and @Nuxeo

Session

Unconference: Memory Safe Native Languages and WASM

Tuesday Apr 8 / 03:55PM BST