It’s hard to believe the 10th Annual QConSF is next week.
As of the Monday before the conference, we had 1,300 attendee registrations. Add to the official attendee numbers:
- 140+ speakers from companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook, Spotify, Amazon, & Stripe working on streaming, microservices, distributed systems, and sooo much more
- 40 sponsors from companies like IBM, Azul, JFrog, OverOps, & Twitter (sponsoring a full stack deep-dive into how Twitter builds services)
- 80 volunteers from the Bay Area, Brazil, France, Egypt, and East Coast
- Permanent staff from 11 different countries (ensuring every part of the experience is amazing)
...and I can’t wait to get started. We expect over 1,500 this year to be a part of this year’s flagship QCon. This QConSF is a special event for me personally, not only because it makes 10 years for us as a conference in the valley, but it also marks a full year since I first joined this amazing team as Chair of QCon. What a ride.
I thought on this Friday before QCon San Francisco, I’d offer a bit of insight into what’s waiting for QConSF attendees next week. Let’s start with the most popular talks.
The most popular talks (as captured by the Schedule Builder where attendees can set up their schedule in advance) is, of course, around Architecture and Microservices.
QCon is a conference for software architects and senior developers. So it’s no surprise the architecture talks are garnering the most attention. Matt Ranney’s "What Comes After Microservices” is by and large the most popular talk. Ranney’s talk is followed closely by Josh Evans (who recently left Netflix) in Mastering Chaos - A Netflix Guide for Microservices.
Both talks are in Tuesday’s Next Generation Microservices track and lean on the incredible knowledge of two software leaders who have been deep inside the creation of microservice architectures at two large scale web companies.
Rounding out the top 6 talks added to attendee schedules:
- Stranger Things: The Forces that Disrupt Netflix from Haley Tucker (SE @Netlfix) in the Distributed Systems War Stories
- How Slack Works from Keith Adams (Chief Architect @Slack) in the Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About
- Scaling Instagram Infrastructure from Lisa Guo (SE @Instagram) in Architectures You’ve Always Wondered About
- What Google Learned about Creating Effective Teams by Matt Sackaguchi (SRE Manager @Google) in Culture as a Differentiator
I sat down a few weeks ago to record a podcast with Keith Adams of Slack (will be released in the next few weeks), and I asked him about biggest challenges with Slack. Here’s what he said:
"Slack's challenges are around maintaining low latency and high reliability. Low latency, for example, is important to making the product actually feel good. This is mostly below the threshold of conscious perception, but, if you mess this up, the product feels bad. It’s hard to say why it feels bad. It just does. In essence, these are textual equivalents to stops and starts in bad video conferencing."
Monday November 7 (opening day for the conference) at 10:25 am Adams will discuss more about Slack’s challenges and architecture, including how they achieve Master-Master replication using Statement Based Replication (SBR) on top of sharded MySQL clusters. If you can’t attend Adam’s Monday QCon talk, make sure to watch InfoQ for a podcast in the next couple of weeks and his full talk in the weeks after that to hear all the details.
Speaking of the conference, I can remember one of my very first conferences. It was a JavaOne sometime around 2002 (or 2003). I was standing in line at the Thirsty Bear to get an adult beverage, and I noticed someone who looked familiar standing in the line next to me. It was Craig McClanahan (original author of the Struts framework). We got to the front of the line at the same time and Craig said “Please, after you.” I said something to the effect of: “After fighting with Struts for the last few years, I think I deserve it.” We both laughed.
That evening a group of Java developers, me, and Craig played pool, drank beverages, and talked frameworks. I learned more about the reasons behind Struts and the many frameworks that followed that night than I had in years of working with the framework itself.
It is random and planned networking encounters like meeting up with Craig at the Thirsty Bear that make conferences absolutely amazing. The belief in the power of networking is baked into the fiber of QCon. You will see it in everything we do at QCon. For example, you will find 25 minute breaks between sessions, Open Spaces, topical lunch tables, and, new for San Francisco this year, QDinners. All done to give you the chance to connect and network with each other.
This year at QConSF, we are doing a variety of Networking Dinners we call QDinner. It’s too late to sign up this year, but we will likely repeat the program at QCon London this March, so look for it there too. QDinners are curated networking dinners where we have our team (which includes Floyd Marinescu -- our CEO -- and myself) match software leaders based on interests, industry, technology focus, and company size. The idea is to group people together in interesting ways, so that each of them can create their own Craig McClanahan story.
Some other fast facts about QConSF 2016 this year:
- Keynotes: Amber Case (Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center and writer of An Illustrated Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology), Michael Lopp (VP of Engineering @Slack), & Neha Narkhede (Co-Creator Kafka & Co-Founder/CTO @Confluent)
- 28 half-day workshops, including topics like: AWS Lamda, Red Team Security Workshops, CQRS, Git Master Class by Github, SpringBoot/Docker, and HTTP/2
- 36% leading software practitioners who also happen to be women on stage
- 10 Opportunity Scholars awarded to attendees (half of those included travel stipends)
Before every single QCon, I say this is the best QCon ever. Well, guess what, this is the best QCon ever! If you’re going to be in San Francisco next week, I hope to see you at QCon. If you can’t make it, look for podcasts and videos going online at InfoQ over the next few weeks. There is some fantastic content coming up. See you there or see you online!
PS: If you can’t make it to QConSF this year, registrations are open for QCon London. While I can’t be certain just yet, it likely to be the best QCon ever! ;)