Schedule
Schedule subject to change.
Monday, November 18th, 2024
Continental Breakfast - Pacific Level
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:
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:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Verifiable and Navigable LLMs 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:
Sociotechnical Resilience
Building and Enabling a Strong Engineering Culture
I want to share how the sweet spot is building an organization that combines scrappy creativity and growth mindset with the rigor of controlled scope and boring technology. Though those ideas can seem in polar opposition it’s embracing both that creates powerfully resilient teams.
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:
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:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
No More Spray and Pray— Let's Talk About LLM Evaluations
The pace of development in AI in the past year or so has been dizzying, to say the least, with new models and techniques emerging weekly. Yet, amidst the hype, a sobering reality emerges: much of these advancements lack robust empirical evidence.
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.
Lunch - Atrium Level & Women in Tech Lunch Session - Waterfront CDE, Atrium Level
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Unified Grid: How We Re-Architected Slack for our Largest Customers
Slack’s enterprise solution allows users to join multiple workspaces within the same organization. However, for years, users could only view channels, messages, and other content from a single workspace at a time.
Track:
Rust [in Production]
Rust Patterns I Have Known and Loved
When adopting Rust, there are many unfamiliar patterns and often what feels like a steep learning curve for those who aren't familiar with the language. For lower-level code, there are some times where trying to do something simple feels outright impossible.
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.
Break
Track:
Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Unconference: Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Seacliff D
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:
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:
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.
Coffee Break & Snacks - Pacific Level
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:
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:
AI and ML for Software Engineers: Foundational Insights
Unconference: AI and ML for Software Engineers
Seacliff D
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.
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:
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:
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.
Conference Social for All Attendees
Tuesday, November 19th, 2024
Continental Breakfast - Pacific Level
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:
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:
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.
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:
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:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Detangling Tightly-Coupled Legacy Codebases
At Stripe, we manage a codebase of tens of millions of lines of Ruby with many tightly coupled components. With our business shifting towards microservices, we found it necessary to decompose this code into reusable building blocks. How do you break apart a monolith a decade in the making?
Lunch - 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:
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:
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?
Break
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
LLM Powered Search Recommendations and Growth Strategy
In this deep exploration of employing Large Language Models (LLMs) for enhancing search recommendation systems, we will conduct a technical deep dive into the integral aspects of developing, fine-tuning, and deploying these advanced models.
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:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Persona-lized Problem Solving with Clojure
Details coming soon.
Coffee Break & Snacks - Pacific Level
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:
Engineering Productivity
Test Automation: Shifting Left for Faster Releases
Details coming soon.
Track:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Unconference: Programming Languages
Seacliff D
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:
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:
Programming Languages and Paradigms for the Next Decade
Coding for a Greener Planet
Details coming soon.
Pacific DEKJ
Exhibitor Reception for Attendees - Dry Snacks & Drinks - Ballroom Foyer & Pacific Level - Ends at 6:40pm
Wednesday, November 20th, 2024
Continental Breakfast - Pacific Level
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:
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:
The Path to Principal Engineer 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
Details coming soon.
Break
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:
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:
The Path to Principal Engineer 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: Hardware and Software Innovations for Optimizing AI Workloads
As deep learning continues to drive advancements across various industries, efficiently navigating the landscape of specialized AI hardware has huge impact in cost and speed of operation.
Lunch - 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:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Improving Accessibility Through Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs)
Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate accessibility tasks represents a transformative advancement in digital inclusion efforts.
Pacific DEKJ
Track:
The Path to Principal Engineer 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.
Break
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:
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:
The Path to Principal Engineer 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.
Coffee Break & Snacks - Pacific Level
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:
Next Generation Inclusive UIs
Inclusive UI Principles in Practice
Details coming soon.
Pacific DEKJ
Track:
The Path to Principal Engineer and Beyond
The Art and Science of Technical Leadership
Details coming soon.
Ballroom BC
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.
QCon Closing Reception - Dry Snacks & Drinks - Ballroom Foyer
Thursday, November 21st, 2024
Breakfast - Seacliff Foyer
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Smart, Scalable Systems and Services With Spring Boot (Continued)
Josh Long - Broadcom
Seacliff B
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
Developing Secure and Robust Enterprise Java Applications with Jakarta EE
Michael Redlich - InfoQ
Seacliff D
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Generative AI Engineering - Composable Building Blocks, Architectural Blueprints, and Enterprise-Grade Readiness (Continued)
Daniel Whitenack - Prediction Guard
Seacliff C
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
Document Processing Using GenAI Orchestrations
Olivier Poupeney - Orkes
Marina
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Platform Thinking: Strategies for Building Effective Platform Teams (Continued)
Wes Reisz - Thoughtworks
Seacliff A
Lunch - Atrium Level
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Smart, Scalable Systems and Services With Spring Boot (Continued)
Josh Long - Broadcom
Seacliff B
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
Seacliff D
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Generative AI Engineering - Composable Building Blocks, Architectural Blueprints, and Enterprise-Grade Readiness (Continued)
Daniel Whitenack - Prediction Guard
Seacliff C
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
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Platform Thinking: Strategies for Building Effective Platform Teams (Continued)
Wes Reisz - Thoughtworks
Seacliff A
Friday, November 22nd, 2024
Breakfast - Seacliff Foyer
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Success Patterns for Fast Flow and Team Topologies (Continued)
Elizabeth Ayer - Conflux
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 (Continued)
Jérôme Petazzoni - Tiny Shell Script LLC
Seacliff C
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
Applied Domain-Driven Design: A Guide for Senior Practitioners
Matt Foster - Thoughtworks
Seacliff B
Training
HALF DAY09:00AM PST - 12:00PM PST (3 hours)
GenAI Development - From Zero to AI Engineer
Daniel Whitenack - Prediction Guard
Marina
Lunch - Atrium Level
Training
FULL DAY09:00AM PST - 04:00PM PST (7 hours)
Success Patterns for Fast Flow and Team Topologies (Continued)
Elizabeth Ayer - Conflux
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 (Continued)
Jérôme Petazzoni - Tiny Shell Script LLC
Seacliff C
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 (Friday)
Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg - Bravely
Seacliff B