Silicon Valley
Past Presentations
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...
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...
Scaling Facebook Live Videos to a Billion Users
Facebook Live is a live streaming platform available to all Facebook users (1 billion daily active people) from Facebook apps as well as an API. It enables citizen journalism, makes it easy to share everyday moments with your friends and allows celebrities to interact with their fans directly....
Consensual Software: Prioritizing Trust & Safety
Online safety has become a huge problem in the world of oversharing. Real name policies, automatic geolocation tracking, and photo tagging increase user adoption rates, but these features can be quickly abused by bad actors. This talk will discuss how to apply a "consent filter" to product...
Blockchain Introduction: Peering Through the Hype
Will answer the questions: what is a blockchain, why all the hype, what makes a blockchain secure, what can be built on top of blockchains, what are some real-world use-cases?
Tips For Creating a More Equal Workplace
Institutional bias is death by a thousand papercuts. Unequal work environments today are comprised of a lot of small inequalities that add up to the gender pay gap, the racial hiring gap, and environments that can be unintentionally antagonistic towards non-traditional groups. This talk covers...
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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