2024 Schedule
Monday, November 18th, 2024
Conference Introduction and Keynote:
Dare Mighty Things: What NASA's Bold Endeavors Teach Us About the Power of Calculated RISCs
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Supporting Diverse ML Systems at Netflix
Netflix uses data science and machine learning across all facets of the company, powering a wide range of business applications.
Track:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Enhance LLMs’ Explainability and Trustworthiness With Knowledge Graphs
Graphs, especially knowledge graphs, are powerful tools for structuring data into interconnected networks. The structured format of knowledge graphs enhances the performance of LLM-based systems by improving information retrieval and ensuring the use of reliable sources.
Track:
Rust [in Production]
Rust: A Productive Language for Writing Database Applications
When you think about Rust, you might think of performance, safety, and reliability, but what about productivity? Historically associated with systems programming, Rust's promise of safety, speed, and concurrency has led to its widespread adoption at the infrastructure level.
Track:
Sociotechnical Resilience
Systems Thinking for Building Resilient Engineering Organizations
The introduction of mainstream LLMs is not only changing the products we build, it's also changing the way we build those products, the way we hire and the way we build our teams.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
APIs and Events: One Platform to Rule Them All
In this talk, Dorian Blanc, Lead Solution Engineer at Gravitee.io will explore how to effectively manage the full lifecycle of APIs and Events in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Optimizing Search at Uber Eats
Uber has an in-house search engine called Search In Action (SIA). As the backbone behind the feed and search capabilities of Uber's Delivery business, SIA plays a crucial role in expanding selection seamlessly for customers which is a strategic advantage to the business.
Track:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Scale Out Batch Inference with Ray
As AI technologies continue to evolve, the demand for processing both structured and unstructured data across diverse industries is rapidly growing.
Track:
Rust [in Production]
High Performance Serverless with Rust
Rust and AWS Lambda seem like the perfect fit. Micro-sized virtual machines and a highly-performant systems language that has a proven track record of delivering a quality developer experience. So why hasn't more adoption occurred?
Track:
Sociotechnical Resilience
What to Pack for Your GenAI Adventure
Get ready for an exciting adventure into the uncharted territory of GenAI product development! This presentation will unpack the essential tools and skills you need to thrive in this new era.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Leveling Up as an Architect When Change Is Relentless
How does an architect level up in a world of constant change? How do you, your projects, and your teams stay responsive while external, often unexpected, events continuously impact your plans?
Lunch (menu) & Lunch topic discussions on Atrium level.
Women & Allies in Tech Lunch Session in Waterfront CDE, Atrium level(Sign-up needed).
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Changing the Model: Why and How We Re-Architected Slack
Over time, the architectural assumptions underpinning a software application may diverge further and further from that application's product requirements.
Track:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Recommender and Search Ranking Systems in Large Scale Real World Applications
Recommendation and search systems are two of the key applications of machine learning models in industry. Current state of the art approaches have evolved from tree based ensembles models to large deep learning models within the last few years.
Track:
Sociotechnical Resilience
Built to Outlast: Cultivating a Culture of Resilience
In the tech industry, where the only constant is change, the companies and individuals who survive the longest are those who have learned to reinvent themselves over and over again by learning to thrive in chaos and uncertainty.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Using AI to Solve Real Problems for Development Teams
For all claims about AI increasing developer productivity, why aren't developers seeing more of an impact?
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Seacliff D
Track:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Why Most Machine Learning Projects Fail to Reach Production and How to Beat the Odds
Despite the hype around AI, many ML projects fail, with only 15% of businesses' ML projects succeeding, according to McKinsey. Particularly with the significant investments in large language models and generative AI, only a small portion of companies have managed to realize their true value.
Track:
Rust [in Production]
Fearless Programming with Rust
Rust is a language that boasts the best of many worlds: ergonomic, expressive, performant and safe. The promise of Rust is being able to write complex code, at any layer of the stack, and be confident that it behaves as intended.
Track:
Sociotechnical Resilience
Exploring the Unintended Consequences of Automation in Software
Automation is ubiquitous—it is entwined in our daily lives in ways that we aren’t always aware of.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Scaling Innovation with NoOps: How Mercado Libre Manages 30,000 Microservices and 25 million RPS
Operating Latin America's largest e-commerce, fintech, and logistics platform presents unique challenges.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Beyond Code: Building a Personal Brand To Boost Your Career
In an increasingly competitive field, software expertise alone may not be enough to stand out and drive your career forward.
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
How GitHub Copilot Serves 400 Million Completion Requests a Day
GitHub Copilot is the largest LLM powered Code Completion service in the world, serving hundreds of millions of requests per day with an average response time of under 200ms. This is the story of the architecture which powers this product.
Track:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Unconference: AI and ML for Software Engineers
Seacliff D
Track:
Rust [in Production]
Myth Busters: Is Rust a Slam Dunk?
We built a high-scale caching service with rigorous latency, cost, and availability requirements in Kotlin. Then, we rewrote our services in Rust. Was it worth it?
Track:
Sociotechnical Resilience
Achieving Sustainable Mental Peace at Work Using GenAI
This presentation explores how generative AI technology can be leveraged to enhance mental health and build sustainable mental peace in high-pressure work environments, particularly for achievement-oriented and neurodivergent individuals.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
Chat-Oriented Programming in Action
Chat-oriented programming (CHOP) is revolutionizing how we write code. This talk will show you how CHOP boosts developer productivity by using AI to generate code, write documentation, automate repetitive tasks, and debug in real-time.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Legacy Modernization: Architecting Real-Time Systems Around a Mainframe
Designing systems that take advantage of modern platforms, tools, and techniques is critical for building scalable, evolvable applications that underpin businesses of all stripes. Leveraging those when your data is captured in a mainframe, which does not scale well, is challenging.
Track:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Reinforcement Learning for User Retention in Large-Scale Recommendation Systems
This talk explores the application of reinforcement learning (RL) in large-scale recommendation systems to optimize user retention at scale - the true north star of effective recommendation engines.
Track:
Rust [in Production]
Rebuilding Prime Video UI with Rust and WebAssembly
Prime Video delivers content to millions of customers, all over the world, on a variety of devices such as: game consoles, set-top boxes, streaming sticks, and Smart TVs. These devices have a vast range of hardware capabilities and performance characteristics.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track I
AI Agent Workflows for Accelerated Development Cycles
In this talk, speaker Andy Piper, VP of Engineering at Diffblue, will spotlight how in today's fast-paced software development landscape, efficient testing is crucial for maintaining high levels of code quality and accelerating release cycles.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track II
Guest Panel Discussion: Leading Engineering Teams in 2024 & Beyond: Tackling AI, Remote/Hybrid Work, and Economic Turbulence
Leading engineering teams in 2024 & beyond looks a whole lot different than it did just a few years ago: AI skill proficiency & tool availability, remote/hybrid work environments, and economic turbulence have completely changed the game when it comes to building & scaling high-p
Tuesday, November 19th, 2024
Conference Introduction and Keynote:
The (Not So) Hidden Social Drivers Behind the Highest Performing Engineering Teams
Break
Track:
Embracing Shift-Left in Data Architecture
Beyond Durability: Enhancing Database Resilience and Reducing the Entropy Using Write-Ahead Logging at Netflix
In modern database systems, durability guarantees are crucial but often insufficient in scenarios involving extended system outages or data corruption.
Track:
Generative AI in Production & Advancements
Scaling Large Language Model Serving Infrastructure at Meta
Running LLMs requires significant computational power, which scales with model size and context length. We will discuss strategies for fitting models to various hardware configurations and share techniques for optimizing inference latency and throughput at Meta.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Moving Your Bugs Forward in Time: Language Trends That Help You Catch Your Bugs at Build Time Instead of Run Time
As we grow as engineers, one of the key realizations that we inevitably come to is that the maintainability of our codebases is of paramount importance to their long-term success.
Track:
Engineering Productivity
Productivity Lessons in Moving from Big Tech to Scaling a Startup
Most productivity research happens in large tech companies. Many of the lessons learned there apply to the world of Startups as well, but some don't carry over.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track III
Transcending the Barriers to Elasticity
Distributed systems expert Jonas Bonér discusses the most common barriers to building highly responsive applications and the fundamental principles that can help unlock the capabilities of cloud, multi-cloud, and edge to building truly elastic, resilient, and agile digital experiences.
Break
Track:
Embracing Shift-Left in Data Architecture
OpenSearch Cluster Topologies for Cost-Saving Autoscaling
The indexing rates of many clusters follow some sort of fluctuating pattern - be it day/night, weekday/weekend, or any sort of duality when the cluster changes from being active to less active. In these cases how does one scale the cluster?
Track:
Generative AI in Production & Advancements
GenAI for Productivity
At Wealthsimple, we leverage Generative AI internally to improve operational efficiency and streamline monotonous tasks. Our GenAI stack is a blend of tools we developed in house and third party solutions.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Refactoring Stubborn, Legacy Codebases
At Stripe, we manage a codebase of tens of millions of lines of Ruby. Like any large codebase, people have no shortage of complaints about it, and it's our job to fix those complaints.
Track:
Engineering Productivity
Inflection Points in Engineering Productivity as Amazon Grew 30x
I joined Amazon in 2009, when we were a 3000-engineer company, and got to experience its fast growth from 3k to 90k engineers over a 15-yr period. During that time, our engineering productivity needs had a number of interesting inflection points.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track III
Scaling and Managing Complex Agentic Workflows with Conductor
Managing complex workflows in autonomous systems poses significant challenges as they scale. This tech talk explores strategies for optimizing agent-based architectures, where multiple agents interact and adapt in dynamic environments.
Lunch (menu) & Lunch topic discussions on Atrium level.
Track:
Embracing Shift-Left in Data Architecture
Stream All the Things — Patterns of Effective Data Stream Processing
Data streaming is a really difficult problem. Despite 10+ years of attempting to simplify it, teams building real-time data pipelines can spend up to 80% of their time optimizing it or fixing downstream output by handling bad data at the lake.
Track:
Generative AI in Production & Advancements
Navigating LLM Deployment: Tips, Tricks, and Techniques
Self-hosted Language Models are going to power the next generation of applications in critical industries like financial services, healthcare, and defense.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Platform Engineering: Evolution, Trends, and Future Impact on Software Delivery
Platform Engineering is frequently hailed as the latest paradigm shift enabling developers to ship code faster - but is it simply a return to the pre-DevOps era of siloed teams focusing on narrow parts of the software lifecycle?
Track:
Engineering Productivity
Security or Convenience - Why Not Both?
Traditionally, security is all about creating obstacles and making it difficult to access data. This is at odds with our drive for a more smooth and faster development process. How can we keep the software we’re building secure without adding friction for engineers?
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track III
Making Spock Groovy through AI
Spock is a testing and specification framework for Java and Groovy applications. What makes it stand out from the crowd is its beautiful and highly expressive specification language.
Track:
Embracing Shift-Left in Data Architecture
Stream and Batch Processing Convergence in Apache Flink
The idea of executing streaming and batch jobs with one engine has been there for a while. People always say batch is a special case of streaming. Conceptually, it is.
Track:
Generative AI in Production & Advancements
Search: from Linear to Multiverse
The future of search is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, shifting from traditional linear queries to a rich multiverse of possibilities powered by AI.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Clojure 2024
In 2007, Rich Hickey introduced Clojure with a clear mission: to offer the simplicity of functional programming with the practicality of languages like Java and C#.
Track:
Engineering Productivity
Supporting Engineering Productivity for All
Understanding what drives software development productivity is the key to making high-impact investments in engineering productivity.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track III
Building Software Architecture from First Principles
As new architectures and frameworks continually emerge, comprehending, evaluating, and applying them becomes challenging. Returning to fundamentals is essential to understand the software design, its intent, and its purpose.;
Track:
Embracing Shift-Left in Data Architecture
Efficient Incremental Processing with Netflix Maestro and Apache Iceberg
Incremental processing, an approach that processes only new or updated data in workflows, substantially reduces compute resource costs and execution time, leading to fewer potential failures and less need for manual intervention.
Track:
Generative AI in Production & Advancements
10 Reasons Your Multi-Agent Workflows Fail and What You Can Do About It
Multi-agent systems – a setup where multiple agents (generative AI models with access to tools) collaborate to solve complex tasks – are an emerging paradigm for building applications.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Unconference: Programming Languages
Seacliff D
Track:
Engineering Productivity
Shifting Left for Better Engineering Efficiency
In this presentation, I will share two critical migration stories - one focuses on production monitoring and the other on production deployments with automated validations.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track III
The Value of Full-Stack JavaScript
Are you optimizing for the right things when selecting your next project’s tech stack? Struggling with accountability and empowerment your agile squad? Skilled in JavaScript but envy developers who program in a “real” language?
Break
Track:
Embracing Shift-Left in Data Architecture
Unconference: Shift-Left Data Architecture
Seacliff D
Track:
Generative AI in Production & Advancements
A Framework for Building Micro Metrics for LLM System Evaluation
LLM accuracy is a challenging topic to address and is much more multi dimensional than a simple accuracy score. In this talk we’ll dive deeper into how to measure LLM related metrics, going through examples, case studies and techniques beyond just a single accuracy and score.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Taming the Configuration Beast with Pkl!
Infrastructure-as-code has revolutionized the way that infrastructure and applications get managed, increasing velocity and scalability. However, this same philosophy has introduced its own problems.
Track:
Engineering Productivity
Slack's AI-Powered, Hybrid Approach for Large-Scale Migration from Enzyme to React Testing Library
With the Enzyme test framework no longer supporting React 18, migrating to React Testing Library (RTL) became imperative.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track III
Securing and Controlling Kafka Access
In this talk, Dorian Blanc, Lead Solution Engineer at Gravitee.io, will dive into securing Kafka by exploring various access control mechanisms.
Wednesday, November 20th, 2024
Break
Track:
Architectural Evolution
Thinking Like an Architect
Are architects supposed to be the smartest people on the team, making all the important decisions for developers to fill in the blanks? Certainly not. Rather, architects make everyone else smarter, for example by sharing decision models or revealing blind spots.
Track:
The Path to Staff+ and Beyond
5 Steps to Building a Personal Brand for Elevating Your Influence
In our connected world, you have a personal brand, whether you like it or not. And you have the power and responsibility to shape what it is. In this talk, you’ll learn how you can grow your personal brand to land better opportunities and have a greater impact.
Track:
Hardware Architectures You Need To Know
Unleashing Llama's Potential: CPU-Based Fine-Tuning
Generative AI landscape is rapidly changing as new models are appearing in horizon every few days. However, the hardware and software characteristics of these models have many similar patterns and execution phases.
Track:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Making Augmented Reality Accessible: A Case Study of Lens in Maps
Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to revolutionize how we interact with the world, but its visual-centric nature often excludes users with visual impairments.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track IV
Balancing Act - Enabling Innovation and Scale for Responsible Generative AI
The unprecedented pace of innovation around Generative AI makes execution, especially scaling, more complicated and difficult across the enterprise.
Track:
Architectural Evolution
One Network: Cloud-Agnostic Service and Policy-Oriented Network Architecture
In this age of an interconnected world, One Network helps customers to simplify deployment of their products and services by providing a unified service and policy oriented network architecture that breaks down the boundaries of public and private clouds, different runtimes and tr
Track:
The Path to Staff+ and Beyond
Engineering Influence and Forgetting the Soft Skills
Soft skills are overrated and dangerously oversold!
Track:
Hardware Architectures You Need To Know
Maximizing Deep Learning Performance on CPUs using Modern Architectures
As deep learning continues to drive advancements across various industries, efficiently navigating the landscape of specialized AI hardware has a huge impact on cost and speed of operation.
Track:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Accessible Innovation in XR: Maximizing the Curb Cut Effect
Accessibility is often seen as the last step in many software projects - a checklist to be crossed off to satisfy regulations. But in reality, accessible design thinking can lead to a fountain of features that benefit disabled and abled users alike.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track IV
From Hype to Large-Scale Production: How LATAM's Largest Company Leveraged Platform Engineering to Build a GenAI Development Platform for 60K+ Employees
GenAI continues to promise industry transformation, but the challenge now lies in moving from hype to real-world, large-scale, efficient, and productive applications.
Lunch (menu) & Lunch topic discussions on Atrium level.
Track:
Architectural Evolution
Renovate to Innovate: Fundamentals of Transforming Legacy Architecture
Renovating old buildings and homes is commonplace, but why is technological renovation often overlooked? Just like a big home renovation adds to the quality of life, a successful architectural renovation has an outsized impact on the pace of innovation.
Track:
The Path to Staff+ and Beyond
Ambiguous Roles and Ambiguous Problems: Navigating Life as a Principal Engineer
The path to Principal Engineer at most companies often feels poorly defined, and that’s because it is. This is a problem. It’s also an opportunity.
Track:
Hardware Architectures You Need To Know
Evaluating and Deploying State-of-the-Art Hardware to Meet the Challenges of Modern Workloads
At GEICO we are on a journey to entirely modernize our Infrastructure. We are building an open-source, cloud-agnostic hybrid stack to run across public and on prem private cloud infrastructure without having to expose vendor specific stacks to our application developers.
Track:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Building Inclusive Mini Golf: A Practical Guide to Accessible XR Development
Creating accessible tools and experiences in VR is an ongoing challenge, especially in visually intensive environments like gaming.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track IV
You Can't Do AI Without APIs: A Practical Playbook for the AI Revolution
Since the AI revolution began in late 2022, the AI API landscape has rapidly evolved.
Track:
Architectural Evolution
Slack's Migration to a Cellular Architecture
Cellular service architectures are a conceptually simple way for highly available online services to limit the impact of cascading failures and improve scale-out. So why aren't we all using them? And how do they even work in practice?
Track:
The Path to Staff+ and Beyond
What Keeps Me Up at Night – Existential Questions for IC Leaders
In this talk, we explore the boogeymen of IC leaders. While critical incidents and uncharted technologies may be scary at the moment, they can also be exactly the challenge that motivates you.
Track:
Hardware Architectures You Need To Know
Optimizing Custom Workloads with RISC-V
This talk will explore how RISC-V architecture can accelerate custom workloads, focusing on AI/ML applications. We’ll start by examining the RISC-V ecosystem and its increasing relevance in the software development landscape.
Track:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Multidimensionality: Using Spatial Intelligence x Spatial Computing to Create New Worlds
Spatial intelligence and multimodal AI models are transforming the way we design user experiences in Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), eXtended Reality (XR) / spatial computing environments.
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track IV
Unlocking the value of Events with AI and EventStoreDB
Join us to discover how you can push the boundaries of Artificial Intelligence innovation, and drive business success, by integrating events into your AI initiatives.
Track:
Architectural Evolution
Building Tomorrow’s Legacy Code, Today
Confronting legacy code and managing technical debt are inevitable aspects of building sustainable systems. Often, when we’re building new code, we don’t keep that inevitable future in mind–that the code we’re building today is the legacy code of tomorrow.
Track:
The Path to Staff+ and Beyond
From Junior to Staff and Beyond: Lessons Learned
Getting to Principal can be a long and winding road – knowing how to navigate it efficiently can expedite career growth.
Track:
Hardware Architectures You Need To Know
High-Resolution Platform Observability
Many observability tools fail to provide us with the relevant insights for understanding hardware health and utilization.
Track:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Panel: Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Augmented, Virtual, Extended, and Mixed Reality unlock the ability to integrate the power of computers more seamlessly into our physical three-dimensional world. However, designing the user experience of these next-generation UIs to be as inclusive as possible comes with a lot of challenges.
Erin Pañgilinan - Cypher Realities, O'Reilly Media
Colby Morgan - Mighty Coconut
Dylan Fox - XR Access, Cornell
Pacific DEKJ
Track:
Sponsored Solution Track IV
Code quality in the AI Era is Needed More than Ever
As developers, we participate every day in our software life cycle by adding new logic, adapting existing code, and integrating with services or platforms.
Thursday, November 21st, 2024
Light Breakfast - Seacliff Foyer
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Smart, Scalable Systems and Services With Spring Boot
Josh Long - Broadcom
Seacliff B
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
[SOLD OUT] Generative AI Engineering - Composable Building Blocks, Architectural Blueprints, and Enterprise-Grade Readiness
Daniel Whitenack - Prediction Guard
Seacliff C
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Platform Thinking: Strategies for Building Effective Platform Teams
Wes Reisz - Equal Experts
Seacliff A
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
Document Processing Using GenAI Orchestrations
Haven King - Orkes
Marina
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
10 Truths in Distributed System Design
Seacliff D
Training
HALF DAY01:00PM PST - 04:00PM PST (3 hours)
Dealing with Challenging People and Situations – Concrete Skills To Overcome the Awkward and Increase Connection (Thursday)
Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg - Bravely
Marina
Training
HALF DAY01:00PM PST - 04:00PM PST (3 hours)
A Little Rust-Y: Using Rust Interop To Boost Performance of Existing Apps (In Any Language)
Chris Price - Momento
Anita Ruangrotsakun - Momento
Garden A
Training
HALF DAY01:00PM PST - 04:00PM PST (3 hours)
Platform Strategy: Innovation Through Harmonization
Seacliff D
Friday, November 22nd, 2024
Light Breakfast - Seacliff Foyer
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Success Patterns for Fast Flow and Team Topologies
Christopher Marsh - Conflux
Seacliff A
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Asynchronous Architecture Patterns To Scale ML and Other High Latency Workloads on Kubernetes
Jérôme Petazzoni - Enix.io
Seacliff B
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
Applied Domain-Driven Design: A Guide for Senior Practitioners
Matt Foster - Thoughtworks
Seacliff C
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
[SOLD OUT] GenAI Development - From Zero to AI Engineer
Daniel Whitenack - Prediction Guard
Marina
Training
HALF DAY01:00PM PST - 04:00PM PST (3 hours)
[SOLD OUT] Dealing with Challenging People and Situations – Concrete Skills To Overcome the Awkward and Increase Connection (Friday)
Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg - Bravely
Seacliff CD