QCon San Francisco (Nov 13-15) is just under 40 days away. QConSF is the flagship software conference of InfoQ.
Marking its 11th year, QConSF will be located at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco (just off the Embarcadero). The conference has over 1,200 confirmed attendees at this point and expects to sell out around 1,600. Add to that approximately 140 speakers, and QCon San Francisco is on track to be InfoQ’s largest North American conference yet! 60-70% of the audience come from senior roles in software making QCon a gathering place for engineers and technical leaders who are pushing the limits of software.
Language Deep Dives
QConSF has a strong language design presence this year. Roman Elizarov from JetBrains is working on coroutines with Kotlin. Elizarov plans to discuss the evolution of asynchronous programming, and how the coroutine approach improves developer flow. Following in that same thread, Sergey Kuksenko of Oracle will discuss the performance and real-world impact of CompletableFuture added with Java SE 8.
While the JVM is an important aspect of QCon, it’s truly a language neutral conference. Mads Torgersen (C# Chief Language Designer/Language Spec Maintainer) returns to talk about his work with C# 8, including Nullable Reference Types and how you introduce the concept of removing nulls without breaking the language. Additionally, Carmen Andoh (Travis CI) discusses go-lang lessons, Jamison Dance (JavaScript Programmer) explores the use case for Elm, and Rust community members Lee Aronson and Carl Lerche are talking different aspects of Rust (and what the language can mean to you). In the Modern CS in the Real World track, Philip Wadler (one of the creators of Haskell) plans to discuss Category Theory in plain English. He will discuss how an understanding of Category Theory bridges you into thinking in a functional way, including concepts core to Monads.
Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are arguably the most impactful trends in software today. QCon San Francisco this November has two tracks dedicated to DataEng (lead by Tyler Akidau, creator of Apache Beam) and Machine Learning Engineering (lead by Shubha Nabar, SVP Salesforce Einstein). Each of QCon’s 18 tracks dedicates a track host (or domain expert) who works to hand select speakers for his/her track. Akidau and Nabar are two of the 18 hosts for 2017.
Note: InfoQ is organizing a new QCon conference focused on AI for Software Engineers, called QCon.AI this April in the Valley. QCon.ai dives more deeply into answering questions SWE’s should know about in AI / ML. The conference aims to explore what the right use cases are for machine learning, along with what makes the most sense/doesn’t make the most sense when applying ML practices.
Talks focused on data engineering and machine learning / artificial intelligence at QCon San Francisco this year include:
- ML for Question and Answer Understanding @Quora, Nikhil Dandekar (Senior Engineering Manager at Quora, where he leads the NLP team)
- Automating Netflix ML Pipelines with Meson, Davis Shepherd (Machine Learning Management @Netflix) & Eugen Cepoi (Sr Software Engineer @Netflix)
- Building Bots and Conversational AI, Mitul Tiwari (CTO/Co-Founder Passage.AI)
- Getting Data Science to Production, Sarah Aerni (Sr Manager, Data Science @Salesforce)
- Data Decisions with Realtime Stream Processing, Rajesh Nishtala (Realtime Data Engineer @Facebook)
- AI & Security: Lessons & Challenges, Dawn Song (Professor @UCBerkeley, Researching Deep Learning & Security)
- Custom, Complex Windows @Scale Using Apache Flink, Matt Zimmer (Realtime Infrastructure Sr Engineer @Netflix)
- And more… Machine Learning and Data Engineering tagged content
Culture / Soft skills
It’s easy to forget that there’s much, much more to building software than the code. How do you scale the engineering org inline with explosive user growth? How do you remain effective and engaged when the majority of your company is remote? How do I make sure I’m working to foster inclusive environments? The list of possibilities touching these needs go on and on.
Three QConSF tracks dive into these topics in 2017. The tracks are: The Whole Engineer (Led by Dave Copeland, the senior most individual contributor @Stitchfix), Beyond Being an Individual Contributor (led by Engineering Director @ShapeSecurity Jarrod Overson), and Culture as a Differentiator (led by Katharina Probst Director of Engineering @Netflix).
The talks feature experiences from organizations like Google, Netflix, Stitchfix, Reddit, and more. Here are some of the confirmed talks covering the harder soft skills of software:
- You Build It, You Secure It (John Willis, Vice President of Devops and Digital Practices @SJTechnologies)
- Testing in Production - Quality Software Faster (Michael Bryzek, Cofounder & CTO @Flow.io., previously Co-Founder & CTO @Gilt)
- Am I a brilliant jerk? (Justin Becker, Engineering Manager @Netflix)
- Attitude Determines Altitude - Engineering Yourself (Randy Shoup, VP Engineering @Stitchfix)
- Building Great Engineer Cultures from 0 to Scale, (Marty Weiner (previously CTO Reddit))
QCon
If you are an engineer or know of an engineer who would love to attend the conference, but can’t for some reason, take a look at https://qconsf.com/sf2017/volunteer. QCon has a volunteer program that offers no cost tickets for those who help out. Volunteers are asked to help with vote counting (the conference uses an electronic IoT/NFC reader system) and some of the logistics at the conference (like helping with badges). A volunteer works two days (typically in one track) and gets the third day to explore freely. It’s a great way to gain access to all the events at the conference.
Registration is $2,195 ($400 off) for the three-day conference. Corporate and group discounts are also available. Please email info@qconsf.com for details.
