Monday (June 19th) marks one week until QCon New York. It's hard to believe the 6th Annual QCon conference tailor-made for the New York area has finally arrived.
Looking back across some of the early news posts for the conference, there is a common thread about the increasing volume of registrations. While QCon New York remains one of smallest of the seven international QCons (featuring around 900 attendees), the conference has seen nearly a 25% year-over-year growth on the heels of last year's extremely popular event and the conference's recent move to Manhattan's Marriott Marquis (centrally located in Times Square).
2017 features an all-star lineup of engineering talent from places like Netflix, Google, Crowdstrike, Lyft, and Oracle. With 133 confirmed speakers over the three conference and two workshop days, QCon NYC has an impressive attendee-to-speaker ratio of just over 6 to 1. That ratio makes this conference one of the more intimate meetups of the world's most innovative shops in software today.
Notable highlights on the schedule include keynotes from Google's Matt Sakaguchi, Stitchfix's Cathy Polinsky, and Crowdstrike's Dmitri Alperovitch. Additionally, tracks (full day curated content paths) exploring all aspects of Microservices, Next Generation APIs, Immutable Infrastructure, Machine Learning, and High-Velocity Dev Teams lead attendee interest for the most popular tracks.
The top talks, as shown by the conference's schedule builder, demonstrate a particular interest in microservices as well as the full breadth of the content offered at the conference. Some of these include:
- Managing Data in Microservices by StitchFix's VP Engineering Randy Shoup
- The Paved PaaS to Microservices at Netflix by Principal Software Engineer Yunong Xiao
- Take Two: Evolving Microservices Architectures by SeatGeek's Platform Director for SeatGeek Open Andrew Hart
- Dynamically Re-Configurable Event-Driven Systems by The Glue Solutions' CTO Dan Goovaerts
- Beyond REST: Coursera's Journey to GraphQL by Coursera's Bryan Kane
- Getting Old(er) in Tech: Staying Relevant by Don Denoncourt of Corgibytes
Each year common threads develop across content lines in the conference. This year is no exception. An interesting thread that emerged this year includes stories around the US presidential election of 2016.
Dmitri Alperovitch, the CTO of Crowdstrike and the person responsible for attributing the state-sponsored hacking of the Democratic National Committee servers by state-sponsored hackers, will be discussing his thoughts on the way ahead for a safer and more secure Internet.
Joining Alperovitch in a separate talk but also discussing aspects of last year's presidential campaign is Hillary for America engineer Michael Fisher. Michael Fisher led a team of four site reliability engineers responsible for maintaining the software systems supporting the 2016 campaign. Consisting of around 70 microservices, the team's role was to keep the systems running through massive DNC convention load spikes, nationally televised coverage for any service failures, and an operational window that went from ramp up to full capability in 18 months. Curl the hillaryclinton.com site and you'll see the development team's tagline still there: Join the only 18 month, nationally televised hackathon.
Both Fisher and Alperovitch's QCon New York talks focus on building and supporting systems and include lessons on security, scale, velocity, load, and immutability.
QCon is organized by the people behind InfoQ.com and provides a platform for innovators and early adopters to share their stories in hotbeds of software development like Beijing, London, New York, Sao Paulo, Shanghai, and San Francisco. The conference is designed for innovator and early adopter engineers responsible for driving their teams forward. QCon is a conference by, and for, software engineers.
If you register before June 25th, registration costs are $2,395 ($255 off the day of ticket prices) for the full three-day conference. Register now to gain access to all of the content during the show and the full recordings that are available to attendees immediately afterwards before the final discounts are gone on June 25th.