Panel: Building Modern Backends

Join today’s speakers in an open panel conversation about modern backends and the languages used to build them. Our panelists today come from backgrounds focused on high performance, legacy modernization, and low latency. The speakers span a variety of software languages and industries. In today’s conversation, the panelists explore the implications of language choice in building modern backends.


Speaker

Chris Swan

Engineer @atsigncompan, Previously Fellow @DXCTechnology, CTO & Director of R&D roles @CohesiveNetworks @UBS @Capital SCF and @Credit Suisse

Chris Swan is an Engineer at Atsign, building the atPlatform, a technology that is putting people in control of their data and removing the frictions and surveillance associated with today’s Internet. He was previously a Fellow at DXC Technology where he held various CTO roles. Before that he held CTO and Director of R&D roles at Cohesive Networks, UBS, Capital SCF and Credit Suisse, where he worked on app servers, compute grids, security, mobile, cloud, networking and containers. Chris co-hosts the Tech Debt Burndown Podcast and is a Dart Google Developer Expert (GDE). 

     

      Read more
      Find Chris Swan at:

      Speaker

      Frank Yu

      Senior Engineering Manager @Coinbase, previously Principal Engineer and Director @FairX

      Frank is an engineering leader at Coinbase, focusing on distributed low latency trading platforms. Prior to Coinbase, he served as Principal Engineer and later Director of Software Engineering at FairX, leading the design and build of what would become the Coinbase Derivatives Exchange post acquisition. Frank has spent over a decade making tradeoffs on mission critical systems with submillisecond response times and loves chatting about complexity, testing, and performance.

      Read more
      Find Frank Yu at:

      Speaker

      Juncheng Yang

      Ph.D. student @CarnegieMellon, Focus on Efficiency and Performance, Previously @Twitter & @Cloudflare, Facebook Fellow

      As a 5th-year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University and part of Parallel Data Lab, Juncheng's research studies and improves the efficiency, performance, and reliability of large-scale web applications with a current focus on caching systems. 

      His works in collaboration with Twitter, Meta, Google, and Akamai have been published at various academic conferences such as OSDI, NSDI, SOSP, and SOCC and have won multiple best paper awards. 

      One of the designs, Segcache, a high-throughput, space-efficient in-memory cache, has been in production at Twitter. 

      Besides being a Ph.D. student, he worked at Twitter and Cloudflare, improving the cache infrastructure's efficiency. Moreover, his research is sponsored by Meta, and he is a Facebook Fellow

      Read more

      From the same track

      Session Backends

      Backends in Dart

      Monday Oct 24 / 10:35AM PDT

      Dart's popularity has surged in the past few years, as it's the language behind Flutter - Google's cross platform front end framework. That's now driving a notion of 'Full Stack Dart', where if you've spent time learning Dart for the front end, why not also use it for the back end.

      Speaker image - Chris Swan

      Chris Swan

      Engineer @atsigncompan, Previously Fellow @DXCTechnology, CTO & Director of R&D roles @CohesiveNetworks @UBS @Capital SCF and @Credit Suisse

      Session Backends

      24/7 State Replication

      Monday Oct 24 / 11:50AM PDT

      Systems that operate non-stop, 24/7 are standard in many consumer-facing industries. Often, but definitely not always, these systems do not have aggressive SLAs nor high availability needs to the degree that some financial systems demand. But that is changing.

      Speaker image - Todd Montgomery

      Todd Montgomery

      Ex Researcher @Nasa, Engineering Fellow @ Adaptive Financial Consulting and a High Performance Distributed Systems Whisperer

      Session Backends

      Leveraging Determinism

      Monday Oct 24 / 05:25PM PDT

      Determinism is a very powerful concept when paired with fast business logic. We discuss both intuitive and not-so-obvious architecture choices that can be made to dramatically scale and simplify systems with these properties.

      Speaker image - Frank Yu

      Frank Yu

      Senior Engineering Manager @Coinbase, previously Principal Engineer and Director @FairX

      Session Microservices

      Data Mesh: Are We There Yet?

      Monday Oct 24 / 04:10PM PDT

      Standing at an inflection point is a magical experience. It’s where we look at what has come before, learn from it, and choose a new path. Data Mesh has motivated many organizations to stand at an inflection point of their approach to data.

      Speaker image - Zhamak Dehghani

      Zhamak Dehghani

      CEO and Founder @Stealth Startup, Data Mesh Founder, Author, Speaker

      Session

      Ubiquitous Caching: A Journey of Building Efficient Distributed and In-Process Caches at Twitter

      Monday Oct 24 / 01:40PM PDT

      Modern web applications widely deploy cache across the stack to speed up data access and improve throughput. In this talk, I will discuss three trends in hardware, workload, and cache usage that shape the design of modern caches.

      Speaker image - Juncheng Yang

      Juncheng Yang

      Ph.D. student @CarnegieMellon, Focus on Efficiency and Performance, Previously @Twitter & @Cloudflare, Facebook Fellow