Silicon Valley
Past Presentations
Full-Scale Elm in Production
Elm is a functional programming language that compiles to performant JavaScript. At NoRedInk we have over 80,000 lines of production Elm code. It's the primary technology we use to build our Web application's user interface, which students around the world use to answer millions of questions per...
Applied Performance Theory
How does your system perform under load? What are the bottlenecks, and how does it fail at its limits? How do you stay ahead as your system evolves and its workload grows? Performance theory offers a rigorous and practical (-- yes!) approach to performance tuning and capacity planning. In this...
Speeding Up ML Development with MLFlow
Machine Learning is more approachable than ever before and the number of companies applying Machine Learning to build AI powered applications and products has dramatically increased in recent years. On this journey of adopting Machine Learning, many companies learn successful Machine...
Scaling Instagram Infrastructure
Instagram is a social network mobile app that allows people to share the world's moments as they happen. It serves 300 millions users on a daily basis throughout the world. In this talk, we will give an overview on the infrastructure that supports its users on this large scale. Topics will...
The Future of Distributed Databases Is Relational
Years ago when working at Amazon on shopping cart infrastructure and the precursor to DynamoDB, my co-founder and I realized that while distributed key value stores were useful for a few use-cases, we missed many of the benefits of relational databases: transactions, joins, and the power of the...
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...
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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