QCon New York (the 6th annual software conference) is just 10 weeks away. June 26-28 QCon returns to its new location at Times Square’s Marriott Marquis, but with the same great lineup of speakers. Last year’s conference featured software leaders like Eric Brewer (CAP Theorem Creator, VP Infrastructure @Google, CS Professor @UCBerkeley), Dr. Anita Sengupta (research professor @University of Southern California), and 143 more speakers from companies ranging from Dropbox to Gilt. 2017’s lineup is off to a similar start.
All three of the 2017 QCon New York keynotes are confirmed. The keynotes are Matt Sakaguchi (site reliability manager @Google) who was featured in a New York Time article on the science behind building teams at Google, Dmitri Alperovitch (CTO/co-founder @Crowdstrike) who has been referenced in nearly every article discussing the hack of the DNC servers during last year’s election, and Cathy Polinsky (CTO of @Stitchfix, previously SVP of Engineering @Salesforce), recently joined Stickfix from Salesforce and was named by Business Insider in 2015 as one of the 23 most powerful women engineers in the world. All three have powerful stories to share!
Each is individually invited to QCon by a domain expert, called a trackhost. QCon does not have a call for papers. Instead, speakers are selected based on how they fit into the story York.com. Some of the early confirmed speakers include:
- Randy Shoup (VP Engineering @StitchFix, previously @Shoply, @Google, @Ebay)
- Yunong Xiao (principal software engineer @Netflix)
- Matt Adereth (managing director @Two Sigma Investments)
- Jim Plush (Sr director of engineering @CrowdStrike)
- Stuart Sierra (clojure developer @Cognitect)
Over 100 speakers are expected at this year’s conference. The conference boasts an attendee to speaker ratio of about 9 to 1. Perhaps one of the most impressive things about QCon events is that the ticket price includes networking opportunities, the live sessions, and full video access to all of the recorded ones, available to conference attendees within 24-48 hours of the session.
With the 15 practitioner-focused tracks (five per day) planned for QCon New York 2017, the hardest problem is choosing which sessions to attend. Here are some of the recently added QCon New York Sessions:
- Fearless AWS Lambdas (Track: Java - Propelling the Ecosystem Forward)
- Servlet vs. Reactive Stacks in Five Use Cases (Track: Java - Propelling the Ecosystem Forward)
- Choose Your Own Adventure: Chaos Engineering (Track: Chaos & Resilience)
- BLESS: Better Security and Ops for SSH Access (Track: Building Security Infrastructure)
- Streaming for Personalization Datasets at Netflix (Track: Stream Processing at Large)
- Getting Old(er) in Tech: Staying Relevant in a Fast Paced Industry (Track: Optimizing Yourself)
One add-on that QCon does offer is a highly focused lineup of workshops on the Thursday and Friday following the conference. Thursday, for example, offers eight different workshops, many of which are half days sessions so developers can gain hands-on practice with two topics like gRPC, a master’s class on Git with Github engineers, or even CI/CD with Spinnaker. In total, 17 workshops are planned.
Here is the current list of QCon New York 2017 workshops:
- Building and Running a Scalable Serverless App on AWS from John Chapin (cloud technology consultant with expertise in Serverless Computing) & Mike Roberts (co-founder/consultant @Symphonia)
- Zen of Architecture from Juval Lowy (president and chief master architect @IDesign)
- From Zero to CD - Virtuous Virtualization from Alexandre Freire (agile coach @IndustrialLogic)
- Introduction to Machine Learning with Redis-ML and Apache Spark from Tague Griffith (head of developer advocacy @Redis Labs)
- gRPC from Ray Tsang (technology architect @Google)
- Continuous Delivery with Spinnaker by Tomas Lin (senior software engineer @Netflix) & Steven Kim (engineering manager @Google)
- Agile Practices: Next-Level Pair Programming from Neha Batra (software engineer @Pivotal Labs)
- Advanced Kubernetes from Carter Morgan (developer programs engineer @Google)
- Implementing Production Ready Microservices with Spring Cloud from Adib Saikali (senior field engineer @Pivotal)
- Java 9 from Adib Saikali (senior field engineer @Pivotal )
- Microservices Security from Adib Saikali (senior field engineer @Pivotal)
Registration is $2190 ($460 off) for the three-day conference if you register before May 6th. Register now to receive the best rate available.
QCon New York is part of a family of international software conferences that span the globe in cities like San Francisco, Beijing, Sao Paulo (Brazil), and London. In all, QCon brings leading software development practices and techniques to six cities worldwide. By focusing on senior developers and architects, clearly separating marketing content from editorial, and an average attendee-to-speaker ratio of around 9 to 1, QCon has developed a reputation as the conference that puts developers first.