Silicon Valley
Past Presentations
Using Quality Views to Tackle Tech Debt @Tesla
When you work in engineering or operations, you become intimately familiar with the challenges of technical debt. It can be difficult, however, to communicate the full cost to others in the organization, particularly to people who are non-technical. Communicating the risks for software systems...
Data Driven DevOps
Devops is usually viewed from a traditional perspective of a collaboration of Dev, Ops, and QA, driven by the change in Culture, People, and Process. But how do you know where you stand and where to move? As in almost any field, data and metrics give you the gauges and instruments. In this talk,...
Monkeys in Lab Coats: Applying failure testing research @Netflix
Industry and academia need each other. Far from the tire fires of production, university researchers have the time to ask big questions. Sometimes they get lucky and obtain answers that change how we think about large-scale systems! But detached from real world constraints, systems research in...
Crushing Tech Debt Through Automation at Coinbase
In the past 4 years Coinbase has grown from one service in production to over 100. Our team has grown 50x, we’ve launched in 30 countries and reinvented ourselves several times as we mature and our industry evolves. We believe a failure mode of financial companies is the death of innovation...
DevOps 2.0 - When Everyone Can Run What’s Built
The cultural change of “DevOps” beyond just developers and operations is just at the beginning.What happens when an entire organization changes from shipping once a year to once a month, then multiple times a month, week or even daily?How do developers approach a sprint when their...
Straggler Free Data Processing in Cloud Dataflow
One of the main causes of performance problems in distributed data processing systems (from the original MapReduce to modern Spark and Flink) is "stragglers." Stragglers are parts of the input that take an unexpectedly long time to process, delaying the completion of the whole job, and wasting...
Interviews
Scaling Facebook Live Videos to a Billion Users
QCon: What is your role at Facebook today, and what are the types of problems you’re focused on?
I’m currently working on the backend for Facebook Live, Facebook Video, and Facebook Messenger. Most recently. I’ve been spending a lot of time on scaling the Facebook Live stack. Facebook Live let’s anybody broadcast across the world using just the camera in their pocket. What this means (in real terms) is the backend has to be...
Read Full InterviewConsensual Software: Prioritizing Trust & Safety
What makes trust and safety important?
Trust and safety is about keeping users safe. Online harassment is unfortunately a reality. When you are part of a community and online space you should be able to connect with one another and work together safe and be productive. My team at Github builds community management tools and features to discourage destructive behavior.
Read Full InterviewBlockchain Introduction: Peering Through the Hype
QCon: What are smart contracts?
We use smart contracts as computer executable code that performs the tasks and provisions that would be described in a real world legal contract. The intention is that it runs in an auditable place to ensure the integrity of this software contract.
Read Full InterviewScaling Instagram Infrastructure
QCon: What are the main problems you are focused on today?
Lisa: I am a software engineer on the Instagram Infrastructure Team. Our team’s main purpose is to keep the scalability of our systems up. While doing that, we identify both short term and long term fixes around scale. Additionally, we work closely with many other teams on the product side to help them to identify bottlenecks and...
Read Full InterviewScaling Uber's Elasticsearch Clusters
How you you describe the persona and level of the target audience?
The target audience are software engineers or SREs who are interested in scaling out Elasticsearch for OLAP workload. The audience should have basic understanding of Elasticsearch and OLAP.
Read Full InterviewSecurity Champions: Only YOU Can Prevent File Forgery
What is the focus of the work that you do today?
Right now I'm working at Synopsis on a team called Product Security, and the focus of our work is to increase the amount of security activities that the engineering team is doing for our products. Our goal is to make the most secure product possible and to increase the security mindset of our employees in the engineering department for...
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