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Videos and Slides

See the QCon San Francisco 2013 video calendar here, and download the slides from the schedule page.

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Keynotes

MONDAY

Design, Composition, and Performance
8:45am - 10:00am

Design, composition and performance are critical in creating software. What are we doing when we design software? In what ways is design taking things apart? What does this have to do with Clojure, languages and libraries in general? This talk will explore the nature of design and composition and how it impacts our approach to software development practice and tools.

The Evolution of Machine Learning from Science to Software
6:40pm - 7:20pm

For decades, theoretical computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians working in the field of machine learning sorted through a variety of problem settings and modeling techniques. In the past decade, practitioners in the field have converged upon a few well-studied problem settings and modeling techniques. As the theoretical entities under consideration have stabilized, the associated software artifacts have matured, and production systems built from these artifacts have proliferated. Developers possess the skills to make critical improvements in these production machine learning systems.

 

In this talk, we'll provide a quick introduction to the well-studied problem settings and modeling techniques in machine learning, then discuss how production machine learning systems are built, and finally examine some open source software projects that may be useful when building machine learning systems. Throughout the talk we'll highlight how developers can use their expertise to build better machine learning systems.

TUESDAY

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Tuning
8:45am - 10:00am

Counter-intuitively, the effects of tuning (tweaks to a system in response to real workloads) often dominate the effects of fundamentally better technology. Well-tuned, bad systems usually outperform less mature, better systems.

 

In this talk, Facebook’s Keith Adams, co-founder of HHVM, the runtime which powers the largest website in the world, will cover:

  • The evidence base: examples where well-tuned incumbents outperformed better, but less mature designs, in both hardware and software
  • The tragedy: how our ignorance of this effect limits technical progress
  • Challenges for planning complex technical projects
  •  

    One of the examples covered will be Facebook’s HipHop Virtual Machine, which was 7x slower than its performance target at the start. Today, it is 2x faster than that original goal. Yet the block-diagram level design of the system is unchanged. There have been no research breakthroughs, conceptual insights, or heroic ground-up rewrites. The 14x difference came instead from tuning: HHVM now does thousands of small things slightly better.

    WEDNESDAY

    The Present and Future of the Web Platform
    8:45am - 10:00am

    In this talk I will survey interesting developments in the Web platform, analyze emergent trends, and make some predictions. I'll cover:
     

  • The evolution of web technologies and APIs in the github era.
  • JavaScript in the Harmony era:
    • as the ubiquitous, high-level web programming language;
      as safe assembly language for compilers such as Emscripten.
  • HTML, CSS, and DOM beyond "HTML5" into the version-free future.
  • Device, System, and Web APIs for portable, power web apps.
  • WebRTC for real-time n-way video, audio, and data communications.
  • Better network protocols, fewer round trips, more piggybacking.
  • Privacy, security, and user agency in the mobile+cloud era.
  •  
    I will demonstrate some of these points with live code demos.

    Keynotes