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The following talk transcript was recorded at QConSF 2017. The text and its copyright remain the sole property of the speaker.
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Welcome to QCon San Francisco!
Live captioning by Lindsay @stoker_lindsay at White Coat Captioning @whitecoatcapx. 
>> Good morning.  Welcome to the 11th annual QCon San Francisco.
I'd like to introduce the CEO of C4 media, and the father of QCon,Floyd Marinescu.
>> Thank you very much.
And the voice was the -- the mother of QCon, Roxanne, we started the company 11 years ago.  Software is changing the world, isn't it amazing, the pace of progress we are experiencing in all domains? We are here to accelerate the software side of human technological progress, that's the ash operation aspiration of QCon.  The way we do that is by helping you adopt new technologies and practices.
  The way we do that is by putting together this event, and also infoQ.com, where we folks on topics being driven by innovators, early adopters, and things that still matter in the early majority enterprise.
  We believe that you want to hear from you peers, so one of the ethos of QCon is tech leads over consultants.  Hopefully there is evidence in the speaker lineup that you can see, hopefully you can see yourselves in the speaker line up, these are peers that you want to know.
And another way that we achieve this purpose is through you.  And so, this conference has an unusual skew towards titles, a lot of senior devs, this is a place where leaders can come and meet each other.  I encourage you to get to know each other.  QCon is run by infoQ.com.  How many of you are regular readers of InfoQ? If you are not, check it out.  It is a news and community website for software devs, a lot of the videos from QCon will be on there, we publish news and books, a great resource for your peers.  And I also have a development background, we treat infoQCon as a product, it has a version number.  So it starts with one track, each track, multiple per  per day, and each track is like a conference of its own.  You can stay in that room if you want to immerse yourself, if people outside in the breaks are interested in the same topics.  We have six editorial tracks from the committee you will hear from, a couple of sponsor tracks as well, clearly labeled. And we will have an AMA room, an AMA track, where you can get more time with the speakers.  And QCon in tote  total has 18 tracks, almost 1600 attendees this year, 173 speakers.  We have increased by 15 percent, and decreased, or improved, the attendee to speaker ratio.  Last year was 11 to 1, this year is 9 to 1.  We brought in more content to increase the value we deliver to you as we grow.  We also have the hallway track.  So we intensionally have 25 minute breaks, that's a chance interest  for you to talk to each other, and catch up on something, or quiet time to think about what you learned.  So peer sharing is at the heart of QCon, and it starts with a number of things.  Open spaces is a meeting format that we are excited for you to try out at some point when you are here.  Here is a video.  
>> The session is really about you, it is here, and it is right now.  
>> That's our agenda right there.  That wall, it is empty.  So we're going to create our agenda as we go.  
>> Take a piece of paper, write down a topic you want to learn about, or have questions about, you can create a space for others to talk with you. 
>> I'm Victor, I want to talk about migrating an on-premise monolith. 
>> It is about connecting us together as experts and sharing everything that we know.  
>> Think about this question that you have, or the topic that you are passionate about, you strike up a conversation and you hear something new.  Maybe you will take that new piece of knowledge that you formed and take it to a conversation and share it.  You can have that chance. 
>> Something surprising will happen during the next year. 
>> Welcome to open space. 
>> A large conference like this, open space is a chance to experience a microcommunity, bringing topics you have.  You see this, facilitated peer sharing in open space in various parts of the schedule.
  Another part of the UX are badges, they are hand-made, we want it to be easier for you to talk to.  A lot of times. 
>>EUGENE BREVDO:  The badges are down here, or the names are small, these, you can see the names 30 feet away.  They are designed for you so you can interact with each other, it is the culture of QCon and I hope you take advantage with that and make connections with each other and learn.  On the back, you can see the SSID and you have a full map of the conference venue.
And another thing that we are proud of, we film all the videos and they will be early within hours, early access for attendees only, this is a feature you seem to use, 20 percent of you will watch it during the conference, I see people watching the videos on their breaks, that is very interesting to see, and you have the ability to share.  If you are in a conference in a talk, you really liked it, you can share it with your peers who couldn't make it.  And so just check by the end of the day, or the next morning, you can have up 50 shares with people.  You will get the early access code by tomorrow, it is available when you log in on the QCon site.
And as I mentioned, we have a version number, we treat it as a product, we are trying a lot of experiments, there's a dozen of experiments and tweaks, you will see the bigger changes.  And something that we are trying this year from a lean-up start-up perspective is the text to screen, you can see it in the corner.  As the experiment, we will know the impact we have, we are doing it for a variety of reasons, not the least of  of which is inclusion, people who are hard of hearing, and those who use English as a second language.  So this is available to you, and it will be in this room for the next three days, and that's our experiment.  We will be polling you in various ways to see what the use of this feature is.  From a lean start-up perspective, if it is well-used, we will continue did he tell  to do it.  We will have an Ask Me Anything track, we will add another track every day, you can see it on the schedule.  We are putting meeting tables all over the place, the foyer has meeting tables and dozens more.
  Something that I'm proud of, we are well known for having good food.  We are healthy QCon, a lot of gluten free options, vegetarian options, and we have healthy snacks on the Seacliff level in between talks.  We go through multiple iterations to coax the venue to do things to our standards, for your standards.
And also, at lunch, we have our discussion cafe.  If you are a little more introverted like me, you probably want to sit at a smaller table and discuss a topic.  You will see them scattered around the lunch room with topic signs on the lunch room, or you can go outside to the tables and relax and not talk to anybody.
  (Laughter).
  Another bit of the detail, the staff that runs this conference is internal.  Other conferences out source that, I think that people bring a lot of care to it.  If you having to multiple QCons, you recognize the faces, and a lot of people at the back of the doors are volunteers that really care about the subject matter.
  I would like to introduce Wes Reisz who put together all the content.  Thank you.  
>> I like that, the man holding the queue.  Welcome to QCon.
(Applause).
Ask any good software team to the secret to success is feedback.
Optimum is an occupational hazard of programming.  You will get each one of these, a custom 3D printed hardware device for collecting votes.  It uses a bluetooth mesh that communicates with all of them, and we have nodes that go around that collect the votes and we can get feedback off the WiFi, there is never an issue, we have our own network and we can get the votes back to speakers as quickly as possible.
  And the way it works, if you look at your badge, there's a graphic there that says NFC reader, or sticker, you pass that over the node, flat, not up and down.  And it will register your vote.  It takes the last one that was recorded.  If you have multiple, don't worry about it, it is the last one that is going to get picked up.  We collect all of these and make them available immediately to the speaker, almost immediately.  You can change them, or offer more detailed feedback by going to the schedule.  What you can do, you can go to the schedule, see what you voted for, and that provided feedback will allow you to give more detailed feedback.  The first is course grain, this allows you to provide more detailed feedback on the talk.  And that goes to the speakers, we take your names off, you don't have to worry about that, and the speakers get this feedback.  If you type something, be nice, they are going to see it, and be honest, too.  They want to improve.
  And in addition to providing it for given this course grain, we want it to be available to you.  How many of you go back to your shops for a tech lunch or something, and you are like, what are the talks I went to? You are overwhelmed by the number of talks.  If you go to my account, click on my votes, you will get a list of all the talks you went to.  You can provide more feedback again.  You can see what talks you went to, what they are rated, this is the help with that memory lapse of figuring out what talks you went to.  So this simple thing.  We provided it for us to get better speakers, we give it to the speakers to give them feedback, and we give it to you so you can get benefit from it, too.  This is what we do with these devices.
  In order for this to work, we have to agree on some terms.  There's one positive up here, that's the green one.  The other ones are varying degrees of negative.  Green, it met or exceeded your expectation, it is actionable, you can implement it, there's a take-away to it, there is new information, it is a practitioner-focused talk.  So what is yellow? It is the first negative, it was missing something.  It was absolutely missing something.  If you do yellow, and please do yellow if you need to, provide that feedback.
And as a speaker, there is nothing more frustrating than getting a bunch of yellows, and you have no idea why.  Give them some context and say, you missed covering jigsaw on this Java talk.  So please give them feedback so they can get better.
  Red is a miss, this is a talk that didn't belong at QCon.  So red, yellow, green, you will see it as you vote as you exit the rooms.
  While we are talking about the schedule, there's a couple things.  A thousand of you used a schedule builder to build a schedule.  We made it to put the tracks in the right room.  Sometimes we have a track that's a run away talk or not, or not, and we will do individual swaps.  And in that case, we will remove the talk and it will be listed at the bottom.  Look for that, we will do swaps on the conference if there's a run on particular ones.
  And looking at the schedule, you will see this icon over here.  If there's a talk that has this icon on it, it is not available on the video access program that Floyd was talking about.  The only chance to see it is to go to it.  If you want to see the talk, you see the icon, you have to go to it.  That's the only hack, the rest of them are available to you at some point.
And speaker interviews, we have -- we interviewed every single one of the speakers, me and a couple other people, we tried to put those online, we always run out of time getting them out there, there's about 45, this will help you identify, if you are trying to figure out if you want to go to this talk, if it is deep enough or the right level, this will focus in on that area.  There are podcasts we are recording that are available, you can listen to a podcast to see if that's the type of thing that you want to hear from this particular speaker.  So those are available as well.
And code of conduct, we know that software has not been the friend liest place for people of underrepresented groups, not here.  Not at QCon.  If you see somebody put into a box and made to feel somehow less, challenge them, and let me and the staff know so we can fix it.  We don't want it to happen at QCon, we will take action.  So please, don't do it.  If you see someone doing it, let me know so we can fix it.
All right.  No conference can exist without an amazing set of sponsors.  IBM, Microsoft, Redis Labs, we have other great ones in the lobby talking about products and things.  They will be doing sponsored give-aways, these are some of the things we will give away tomorrow.  We will do a raffle for those that go by and visit.  In addition, we have two tracks where sponsors can talk about products.  We do not allow sponsor talks in the editorial, but we have two tracks by sponsors, and they are clearly labeled, so you make the decision.  If you want to go to the talk, great, realize it is coming from a sponsor.  It does not mean it is not technically relevant, but it is coming from a sponsor.  We want to be clear if it is sponsored or not, with all of our talks.
  And one in particular here is Mike Spicer, the event driven architecture for driven analytics, this is popular on the schedule builder.
  And the other on the sponsor track is Chris McFadden, building an API that lasts, the top 15 or 16 talks.  And this is how you identify them.  So the sponsor tracks are right there, and the rest of them all are organized by the people you are about to meet as the curators of the talk.
And, all right, tonight's event: We will go to Jillian's, and the bus will loop back and forth, we will have food, not just light stuff.  There will be drinks, fellowship and friendship, make sure that you come.  It is a good time.
Please bring your badge.
  Okay, and so when I first started doing this for QCon, I wasn't sure about what I thought about track introductions, I thought I could look at the schedule.  I have come to love this.  These people are the heart of the engine, they curate each of these talks. As you may have read from the emails that I send you, we have a person that curates these tracks, they formulate a vision working with this committee that I will talk about on Wednesday, and they will -- they make their vision come to life.  They tell a story with the track.
  So what I want to do is to ask each one of the track hosts to tell you about their vision and their story and the speakers that are going to be in it.
First up is Chris Slowe.
  (Applause).
>> Hey, everyone.  I'm excited to be running the track on architectures you have wondered about.  I found out this morning we had three out of the top 10 slots in the survey, of the people that signed up for talks.
I know vote briigating when I see it at Reddit.  With the infrastructure, we know that perfect infrastructure comes fully-formed from the head of Zeus.  For the rest of us, there's a little bit of work involved, missteps, and so we are trying to highlight those during this track.  We are opening up with Edward Wible and Rafael Ferreira from Nubank, the counter point to my usual line, that we're not a bank, whenever  confronted with the CAT Theorem.  They are talking about building a modern stack without relying on a PP11 at the back of the stack.
  Next, we have Tyler McMullen from Fastly, talking about scaling distributed systems.  And so it is going to be great.
  Next up, Neil Williams from Reddit, our infrastructure architect will be talking about the history of Reddit stack and the series of disasters, some man-made, some natural, mostly artificial that happened there.
And moving from procrastination to communication, Bing Wei will be from Slack channel on scaling up their back end, and dealing with concurrent procastinating, or communicating users.  And after the open space, we're going to go into metainfrastructure, we will have Dave Casper on how to apply modern data sciences principles in building up infrastructure, what can't data science do.  Looking forward to that, hoping to see a lot of you there.
(Applause).  
>> Good morning, I'm Justin Lambert with StitchFix, I'm excited to be here to present the You Build It, You Run It track.  We're going to talk about what it means to develop, deploy, and maintain services in production.
  We're going to start off this morning with John Willis from SJ technologies about how to integrate security into your entire development pipeline.
And, building on the stuff that we've been doing with integrating operations and development.
And after lunch, we will have Sarah Wells from the financial times on how to develop microservices for supportability without losing control of your inbox.  How do you not wake up to 20,000 emails in your inbox that are entirely not actionable.
  Mike from Flow will talk about this afternoon also about how to test in production, how do we confidently take our new code in production and test it in a way that builds confidence in our code and maintains that throughout the life cycle of our application.
  Szczepan will be talking about how continues delivery allows LinkedIn to deploy new features to 500 million users multiple times a day, and how it helps with the Moquito testing framework.
  Wrapping up is Nora Jones from Netflix, giving tips on how to develop microservices for resilience, and how chaos engineering can help make sure that -- help ensure that we have consumer -- confidence for applications running in production.  I hope that you join us today for You Build It, You Run It.
(Applause).  
>> Hi, I'm Shubha, and I had a very fun time organizing the machine learning and AI track this year.  The track really has two themes, the first is around enabling really rapid experimentation and production realization of machine learning pipelines, in production and at scale.
  And the second theme is around deep learning, and its applications to natural language understanding, in particular.
So the first speaker today is going to be Nikhil, who leads NLP, and we are going to learn the lifetime of the Quora question.
  The next speaker is Jeremy Herman, who runs the machine learning platform team at Uber, we will hear about the platform that powers applications like Uber Eats.
And David and Eugene from the personalized infrastructure team at Netflix will talk about their orchestration service that powers thousands of personalization and recommendation pipelines at Netflix.
  And Sarah From Salesforce will talk about building personalized models for each customer using a microservices architecture.
And then we are going to hear from Mitul, who is the co-founder of passage AI, on how deep learning can be used to build conversational bots.
  And at the end of the day, we will have a fun panel on the feature of machine learning and software development with folks from Facebook, StitchFix, TensorFlow, salesforce, and GitHub.
So hope to see everyone there.
(Applause).
>> Good morning.  I'm Kavya, I will be hosting the 21st century languages track.
And now, the reason behind this track is quite simple, as programmers, we are all inherently programming language geeks.  This is, at least, very true of me.  And, in my opinion, there are two interesting and fascinating themes in the programming languages space.
There are the individual languages, and the interesting properties they have, the benefits they offer individually, and how they are relevant to the applications we're building today.
  And the second important theme is the why behind the languages, the why behind the technical decisions of the languages.  And these are the two themes the track will cover today.
The first talk is by Carmen, who will be talking about the technical decisions behind Go, as it is today.  So why the language provides go routines for concurrenty.
  The next talk is Mads, the chief language designer at C sharp, and talking about where the language is headed, the technical decisions to come in the future.
  And moving to the applied side of languages, we have two Rust contributors who will me  be talking about the core concepts of Rust, and how they are applicable to the applications we are building today.
  We will have Carl talking about applying these concepts to linker D, a service mesh proxy.
  We will have Dave talking about building high performance applications using Go.
I'm looking forward to all of these talks, hopefully so are you, hope to see you all there.  Thank you.
(Applause).  
>> Hello, welcome to QCon.  I'm Monica Beckwith, I'm the host for your performance myth busting track.
  Performance is near and dear to me, I have been working on performance for the past 15 years now.  When trying to host this track and thinking about what I want to see with performance, I decided that I want to go cover things that is important to everybody in your daily life: Memory management, for example.
  We have a talk on garbage collection, or how to improve that, which is Min Ni's talk.  He is talking on Python's management, which Instagram uses on their back-end, which is amazing and think about the scales they have to use.
  We will start with Ben Watson, on how to scale dot net, and the search engine is based on dot net technology.
And then it will be moved to pacific BC, the rest of the talks will be in Bayview AB.
  And I have Sergey, we were on the Oracle performance team, he will talk about something interesting with regard to Java, we will talk about the pit falls of asynchronous programs, and why do we need it now.  So that is going to be something that I want to listen to as well.
  And after that, if you are into Java and you know about open J9, so that is IBM's J9 project, their JVM, that is open source now.  So we have Marius talking about J9 and how its advantages to the open JD community.
  And finally, we will have Ioannis from Netflix, talking about ND bench, an online application scaling benchmark, and that's how they have -- they will talk about the design, they will talk about how it helps them replicate different workloads on the time.
  I hope to see you all, we will also have a panel, I would love to have your performance questions and sit by our expert panel.
So sorry about the overflow.
(Applause).
>> Hello, I have done the track host things a couple times, and this is my first non-technical host opportunity, at first I thought it would be difficult, I didn't know how my network would support it, but it was fun and easy because a lot of people fell into my lap quickly.  This is something that has been close to my heart for the past 10 years, career training, career progression and leadership training in technical roles in engineering organizations is often overlooked, it is not infrequently that really good software engineers get sucked into management vacuums, and are told to do little else than figure it out yourself.
  If you have found yourself sucked into that vacuum, or might be aspiring to be so in the future, hopefully we can help.
  First up, we have Josh Evans, the senior director of platform service engineering at GitHub, formally of Netflix, with a session vision, strategy, and epiphanies of the Netflix leader.  He will be diving into the aspects and constructs that visionary leaders need to have in order to be making the right decisions over and over and over again.
And next up, we have Ivanna with customer IO, and she is talking about leadership via mentoring, and practicing leadership by mentoring others now.
  After lunch, we have Matt Abrahams on speaking up without freaking out, he is the author of a book with the same name, and it is hard to be a confident leader without being able to express yourselves in front of large groups of people.  You cannot have the stage presence of Steve Jobs without starting somewhere, this is a place to start.
  We will have Ariya on making a bigger impact, talking about the qualities that technical leaders have and how you can apply them to life now.
And finally, we have Tasneem, engineering at Uber, and her session: Say it right, the power of coaching, which is -- it goes on to describe how being an engineering leader is much more than your past or current quality of code or architecture decisions, and it has a lot to do with how you interact with other and how you motivate people on a daily basis.
  So this track is for everyone, there's a lot of leaders here and probably others that will be leaders in the future.  The core theme of all of these sessions is practice, you can practice technology all you want, without practicing how to lead effectively, you will not be an effective leader.  So hope to see you all there, thank you.
(Applause).  
>> So, what did you think? Sound like a good conference? So give these guys one more hand, thank you so much.
(Applause).
Thank you, it is awesome.
(Applause).
I want to call out the AMAs, this is one of the other experiments that Floyd mentioned we are doing.  We get these post-conference surveys, that there are groups of people that are smaller than a track that want to connect.  We pulled the speakers together from different tracks that have commonalities and put them together.  So today, we have each of the keynotes that you are going to hear about here in a few minutes, they will do an AMA, after the keynotes, you can ask questions about the amazing stuff you are going to see.  You can get together with contributors, maintainers, and language spec maintainers for languages for Go, Rust, and Dot Net.
So 31 talks, four AMA, four open spaces, two panels.  Sound like a good plan?
All right.  We've talked enough.
Well, we haven't talked enough.  We will say one more thing.  You have three days, the great philosopher Muhammad Ali once said, don't count the days, make them count.  This is day one, make it count.  Now I have talked enough, we will bring up the morning keynotes, and I told you about track hosts, and what we first start with are the program committee members. So the gentlemen that is coming to the stage is a member of the committee who curates the conference, picks the speakers and the track hosts, we meet every week for 25 weeks, this guy has been a champion a QCon and he is going to introduce this morning's speaker.  Please welcome Randy Shout to the stage.
(Applause).  
>> Hello.  There it is.  Cool.  Yeah, so it is with great pleasure but, like, particularly personal pleasure that I introduce Julian Guthrie and Dan Kreigh, they are talking about how to space a spaceship.  It comes from a book that Julian wrote, which my son and I read, so I got it for my 11-year-old son as a Christmas present last year, I bought him this book that I thought he would really enjoy, and we then went to the Hiller Aviation museum in San Carlos, 25 miles south of year, which we are members of, and Julian was doing a signing with the guy who piloted spaceship one.  That was a fantastic signing, we ended up getting connected after that, and now here she and Dan Kreigh are.  So Julian is an award-winning journalist, she worked many years at the San Francisco chronicle, she is the author of how to make a spaceship, also the author of the billionaire And the Mechanic, about Larry Ellison's quest for the Americans cup, she is working on a book, Alpha Girls, about women in Silicon Valley and the struggles they have gone through and the achievements they have made.  That is already optioned for TV and movie rights, and how to make a spaceship was optioned for a TV series.  So that is pretty cool.
  Dan Kreigh is the engineer's engineer.  He is a structural engineer and helped make sure that the spaceship one was space and air worthy, it had to be both.  He was instrumental in making sure that this goofy and amazing feather design was a flyable thing, he has been a structural analyst on more aircraft than anybody else in the world.  Because he works for scaled composites, they continue to build at least once a year a new air frame, a new aircraft from scratch, and Dan's the guy that figures out if this is going to fly.  So please welcome Julian Guthrie and Dan Kreigh.
(Applause).
>> Thank you.  Good morning, everyone.  Thank you for that great introduction.  It is fantastic to be here, and I appreciate, again, the invitation.  You may think about what does making a spaceship have to do with what you all are doing? It is something that is very similar, that is architecting designing the future that you want.
And I'm going to go through this pretty quickly.  I wrote this -- this book that was about 340 pages, and I have winnowed it down to five key take-aways that I hope will inspire you at the conference and going forward with your own moonshots, your own crazy dreams, and with whatever it is that you are trying to succeed at that may be difficult.
  The first is follow your passion, this gets very important as the story goes on here.
If we can get the clicker to work.
There we go.  I don't know if I have to get closer here.  It is not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.
So the reason why, now we're clicking ahead.
The reason why this is so important is because there's a lot of people in your life, and this may speak to the Sebastians in the room, the young people in the room, to all of us, where there are others that have an idea of what you should do or what you should be.  This is a story about finding your passion.  So the story starts with this boy named Peter Diamandis, the child of Greek immigrants, and his family came to America, struggled, hisfath father became a doctor, and it was expected that his son of Greek immigrants follow in the father's path.  Here he is, as a little boy, with his toy medical kit, checking his mother's pulse.  When people met him, they said, hello future Dr. Diamandis.  He was really on this path.  And he loved science, he loved tinkering and to make things.  He was not as interested in medicine.  And this is really a key thing.
  So, between the photo that you saw and this photo, something really important happened.  It was July 1969, Peter Diamandis was 8 years old when his parents let him stay up late and he watched the landing of Apollo 11 on the moon.  He was his wide-eyed boy that was transfixed as he watched man set foot on another celestial body for the first time.
And he sets out, that really set him out on this entrepreneurial kind of adventure story, where he so wanted to become an astronaut.
And here, you see him in this picture, he's a rocket boy, he is making, tinkering, building, he is testing out all sorts of chemicals, he and his buddies were hoarding explosives in their bedrooms, and dividing up the stash so that if one stash were discovered, the other would be safe.
Making -- starting with Estice rockets, making motors of all kinds and rockets.  So remember this, we're going to come back to him.
And the next take-away is take big chances, a key theme in this story all along.  If you can dream it, you can do it, Walt Disney.
  So next, we're going to introduce you to a key person who Randy referenced, that is a fellow named Burt Ritan, here he is, you met and saw Peter as a little boy.  And you see that he has this love of space and love of rocketry.  This is Burt Ritan as a little boy, and his love is always planes and aviation.  He's a kid, there is no way if a plane is flying overhead that he could not look up, he has to study planes and dream of planes, it was in his marrow, the same way that rocketry was for Peter. 
So by the time he's a teenager, he is building these very impressive, national award-winning model planes, and it is interesting because this is true to Burt throughout his career, and that is he never wanted to build anything from a kit.  He always wanted to build something of his own design.  His brother, Dick Ritan, who will go on to become a famous military pilot, would build and fly these model planes from kits, and crash them, and the younger brother, Burt, would pick up the basal wood pieces and build something of his own design.  Again, he didn't want to make something that someone else had already built.
So, here he is, looking a lot like Elvis, if you can see him in this plane.  He starts making these kits so you can build a plane in your own garage.  This is the cool delta wing there, and Burt is flying it, I love that picture.
So he is making, again, planes of his own design, and very improbable flying machines.  You know, and this was -- I took a picture of this in the Mojave desert, this is Burt's old drafting table, which I thought was pretty amazing.
  And this is when Burt Ritan became famous.  And this was the start.  This was the taking big chances -- what it embodied.
  This plane, The Voyager, flown by his brother, Dick Ritan.  They set out to do what others said was impossible, build an airplane that can fly non-stop, non refueled around the globe.  They succeeded, 1986, this lands on Edwards Air Force Base, they're on the cover of every magazine across the globe, a small team doing big things, which is another takeaway here, and a big plane, improbable, and a flying gas tank, they had 17 gas tanks in the wings, all the way down the wings.
  So super innovative, the next takeaway, small teams do big things, this applies to all of you and what you are doing here, and trying to do, and I'm sure succeeding and doing.
And so I love this quote, very high-brow, where are we go? We don't need roads.  Back to the future.
  That is true about innovating and making things of your own design, and not making things out of a kit, as Burt Ritan has done successfully.
  Now we're back to Peter Diamandis, this quintessential space geek, who is doing everything he can do to become a part of the astronaut core, and still trying to please his parents.  He goes to MIT, and to Harvard and gets a medical degree to please his parents.  He has no intention of practicing medicine.  Here he is, getting his degree.  And he thinks secretly, this is how badly he wanted to get to space, maybe if I go to Harvard, it will advance my chances of going to the astronaut core and I can glean details so I can live really long that will eventually allow me to get to space.
  So he, again, he goes to MIT, he goes to Harvard, gets an aerospace degree, gets a medical degree, and -- but, at this point, once he gets out with these degrees, he is sure that space is his mission.  He founded a national student space club, he founded an international space university, he has started a rocket company while at Harvard, he is clearly an under achiever.
(Laughter).
  Here, he is meeting Arthur C. Clark, the scientist, and science fiction writer.  And I like his feathered hair-do.  
You can see some pictures here.
  So here, at this time, this was the early 1990s, and the space shuttle, to many space dreamers, the space shuttle was flying, but over budget and under delivery.  Peter is thinking he is not going to get to space and he needs to come up with another way to get to space.  He doesn't think he will get into the astronaut corps, and if he does, the chance of it  flying is slim.  He meets with space geeks and rocket scientists, and I love the mantra, small teams can do great things, he is writing all of these propulsion aspects, he is in his element.
  So this is 1993, so he has his a-ha moment in an unlikely place, or as the writer says, a likely place.  In a book.  He is at home, Christmas of 1993, he reads the Spirit of St.  Lewis by Charles Lindberg.  He thought that Lindberg flew as a stunt to get from New York to Paris, and he realizes it was not as a stunt, but to win a $25,000 prize, put out by a French hotelier, Raymond Orteg.  So when Lindberg lands in Paris, he is the most famous man on earth and he jump-starts the commercial airline industry.  And Peter thinks, what if I could do the same thing that Orteg did through Lindberg, through an incentive competition, for commercial space? What if I could jump-start an industry again that did not exist at this time?
So in 1996, in St.  Lewis -- St.  Louis, he announces a $10,000 prize for the first man that can drive a manned rocket to the start of space in two weeks.
  It is at the Van Carmine line, at the internationally adopted start of space.
  He has Buzz Aldrin with him, and this is the start of the race.
And he announces this prize, and again, the key thing is private companies, non-governmental.  And, at this time, only the world's three largest governments: China, the US, and the Soviet Union had managed to get man and space to back.  This was an impossibility in many minds.  It was launched, $10 million, and you should note that experts are sometimes clueless, don't listen to the nay sayers.
  But a good thing, it is definitely key to this story, and so I love this part of it.
So, once this is launched, so success is being able to move from one failure to the next with enthusiasm, said Winston Churchill.
  What do you get when you announce this $10 million prize, an incentive competition? This can be utilized by many different companies today.  So you get this maverick who is living in the Mojave desert in a burned house of his own design, you get a guy who has, for his mail box, the tail section of an airplane.
(Laughter).
  Conventional, right?
You get Burt Ritan, there he is behind his computer, who is intrigued trigued by this who loved space.  You get Steve Bennett, from the UK, who drops his job in the Coligate factory.
  You get Demitrius who drops out of engineering school, who builds a rocket in his father-in-law's backyard in Bucarest.
  You get these different types when you launch this competition.  You get Paublo DeLeon in Brazil, a fellow, John Carmack, who launches Armadillo Aerospace, he takes what he learned in programming for video games, Famous Quake and Doom and apply it to rocket science.  Can he do that?
So they are all in the quest to win this $10 million prize and to create a private path to space that just did not exist.
And so, here we have, we're going to move forward, you saw that briefly, if you didn't blink, inside the cockpit of spaceship one, the feather mechanism that Dan will talk about, he will tell amazing stories from the inside and building this.  This was Burt Ritan's a-ha moment.  And the another take-away is to persist.
And so as, I'm going to move forward here.  So as these teams are madly building these, you know, these crazy contraptions and flying machines, you have Peter Diamandis, key point, he launches the $10 million prize in St.  Louis, and $10 million for the first team that can build and fly a manned rocket to the start of space.  Minor detail, he didn't have the $10 million when this was announced.  Very bold.  And as people are building these rockets, he is knocking on these doors, he is told no 150 times, why isn't NASA doing this, what if someone dies, risk-averse, there's Elon Musk, talks to Jeff Bezos, and he finally finds someone that is willing to take the risk, I love it that it was a woman.
This is Anusia Ansari, an engineer and had a successful exit with her own company.
This is Anusia when growing up, she was a dreamer of space, a lover of space, she told me a fun story, when she would sleep out on her grandmother's patio in Teiran and playing to the aliens, please, please, take me away.  This is a true story.
(Laughter).
  So we will go back to her.  So the day has come, I'm flashing forward here, the building -- the spaceships are being built.  In the Mojave desert, Burt, and his team, and Dan, they have the spaceship ready, they built the mothership, the hybrid motor, the rocket, their test pilots are out of the right stuff, tens of thousands of people descend on the Mojave desert on the first flight to space and the prize flights.
  These are people coming in for what they hope is history in the making, this beautiful spaceship one, pushed out of the hangar in the dark of night, in the very early morning.  Everything on the line, here it is in that beautiful morning light, taking flight, will it work or not, will it succeed? Every flight was full of anomalies, the pilots risking their lives, this is Richard Branson looking at this.  And next up, I think we're going to see another famous figure who started this whole captivating adventure, buzz Aldrin, and the woman in the sunglasses is the wife of the test pilot, and that's a very special woman here.
  And this is Peter Diamandis with his father, everything on the line, watching this, and his father realizes that his son is not going to be a doctor.
  (Laughter).
  And in this moment, though, all of these dreams, so here you have spaceship one drop launched, going faster than a speeding bullet, 3,000 feet per second, almost straight up, the pilot white-knuckleing it there, thousands of people on the desert floor below, all the media there, what a spectacle it was on this day.
  There is victory, there is 8 years in the works, there are dreams that have been on the line, there is the impossible that was suddenly made possible after 10 years of hard work, of course.
And Anusia Ansari, the whole team, and there was a secret backer.  He stayed secret for some time, of the scaled composite spaceship one program, that was Paul Alan, you can see him in the cap, behind Burt.  Here is Peter, the quintessential space geek, after victory was made.
So dream big, change the world, which is what this story is about, and I was so proud that I got to tell it.  This is a great line by Burt Ritan, the day before something is a break through, it is a crazy idea.  So remember that, if somebody says it is a crazy idea, it is probably full of promise and probably something you should be pursuing.
And I'm just going to wrap up here so I don't cut into dan's Time.  So we have small teams building big things, the world's first private spaceship, pretty amazing.  This girl, who dreamed of space, went on to become the world's first private female space explorer, spent 10 days at the International Space Station, John Carmack, the CTO of Oculus Rift, still working on rocketry, and the rocket boy himself made history with this dream.  Spaceship one hangs in the Smithsonian Air and Space museum, the Gallery of Flight, the Milestones of Flight Gallery in the Smithsonian, hanging next to the spirit of St. Louis.  Thank you, I hope you take this talk and find your ways to innovate and do great things in small teams.  Thank you very much.  Dan, c'mon up.
(Applause). .
  >> All right, spaceship one.  The last time spaceship one flew was 14 years ago, but the story behind spaceship one is timeless.
>> Three, two, one.  
>> Let me fly in space.  
>> Let me see that black sky.  
>> We are all set, copy that.
>> On June 21, 2004, a privately-made rocket plane launched into history.
Its mission? To become the first commercial man space vehicle. 
>> This is not good. 
>> If successful, the flight of spaceship one will open a new era of space exploration.
>> Wow, you would not believe the view.  
>> It was horrid to see that black sky. 
>> How many of you have seen the documentary, Black Sky? A few? All right.
The -- it was pretty dramatic, like over dramatized, but it was that stressful.  It was a crazy program.  I'm in awe of you, you are in a different world than I am, I'm a mechanical engineer.  You amaze me.  How many of you have seen spaceship one in the Smithsonian, or came to the high desert to see it fly? Cool.  That was a crazy time when the little town of Mojave tripled in population by three times, it was an interesting time.
So, spaceship one, the first non-government manned spaceship to make two uborbital flights to space in two weeks, and winning the prize that Julian talked about.  Built and flown in less than three years by a few dozen people.  I have still asked, how is that possible? It was such an amazing program. And the simplest answer is the incredible leadership of spaceship one designer Burt Ritan is what made the program successful.
  Up to that point, since 1972, Burt's companies developed over 42 manned aircraft types.  This airplane in the upper left hand corner is what we are used to, we spent 4,000 hours on it, it is a striking airplane, and able to go over 60,000 feet.
  So Burt comes to us and says, we're going to build a spaceship.
(Laughter).
  And so, the cluster of points in the lower-left corner, that's the performance that you just saw, it the the same graph, at  altitude versus air speed.  What makes you think we can get to the capabilities of a spaceship that goes 3 times the speed of sound? We thought that Burt lost it at that point.
  I like the David Copperfield --.
  And Burt laid out points for success and won us over.  Keep it simple.  How do you keep a spaceship simple? It sounds like it would be complex.  There is no heating or cooling for the pilot, which sounds ridiculous, the flight from the mother ship to when it comes back is only five and a half minutes, not that long.  And I emailed Burt and the head message of the engineer to confirm that was true, it is amazing to me that there was no -- the pilots wore a lot of socks and clothes, I guess.
  (Laughter).
  So no cabin heater or cooling for the pilot, small, round windows, managing structural stress and weight.  Maybe not pilot stress.
  (Laughter).
  That would make my job easier.  No pressure regulators, and no active stability augmentation, no throttle, it is on or off.
(Laughter).
  Yep, again, sacrificing pilot comfort.  No front wheel, you are not landing or taking off.
  (Laughter).
  Yeah, that's Burt, I tell ya.
(Laughter).
  No propellant pumps, no real thermal protection, no separate pressure and tank, the nitris pressurized itself at 700PSI.  There is only one rocket motor control valve, only one part, and no in-flight gear retraction method.  There is just one gear, it comes down, that's all you need to do.
  And rocket motor assembly was glued to the fuselage with silicone, the walls were bon  bonded to the rocket motor.
  This shows you the rocket motor arrangement, the ball is the liquid nitrogen, and the solid grain is the tube in the back is coming off of the back of the pressuring tank that routes the fuel.  So the valve is in between the two, the way the combustion starts, it opens up, spills nitrous and there are sparkleers that get it hot and the combustion process going.
  One cool thing about spaceship one, it has to fly sub sonically and super sonically in space.  It requires three control systems.
  So sub sonically, that's what all the push rods that you see, the control stick.  So it is just like you are still sitting down at the local airport.
  And once you go super sonically, those do not work.  So you have actuators on the tails that control it super sonically, in space it does not work because of no air.  But there are thrusters that control altitude.
This is like a SCUBA bottle, with 6,000PSI, it is not too much.
(Laughter).
  So these are the basic steps that Burt laid out that won us over, maybe we can actually do this.  This was the turning point for me.
I had been with the company for 13 years at that point, and the first step was build the mothership as identical to the spaceship one as possible.  And that was just -- that was genius.  And so, it is no coincidence that the cockpit of the mothership looks like the spaceship, it is from the same tools, same materials, windows, everything.  And as many systems were replicated from the spaceship to the mothership, the navigation, the pressurization, and the pneumatics of the feather, the landing on the mothership.  So every time they flew the mothership, they exercised all of the structure and systems in the spaceship, so you can quickly identify any problems.
  And plus, the pilots can fly as many times as they want to simulate the landing and cockpit environment. 
And next point, build the spaceship.  And after that, it was just test flying, you know, it makes sense, of course, to curate the spaceship on the mothership and see how the two interact, and drop test the spaceship.
And so, it is a lightweight glider, so the pilots can evaluate how it flies and glides.  Very incremental test pilots that come out, I can see how it is happening, it is amazing.  The feather is what folds the spaceship in half, a very unique feature.
  Fill the nitrous, and then you have thrust.  Fire the rocket motor for a short duration burn.  All of this makes sense, fire the rocket motor to get high enough, and the feather folds the ship in half.  And now we are ready for the X-prize, two more flights and we are done.
  Almost that easy.
And so, this is kind of a fun graphic.  This one on the side of the mother ship, to record each one of spaceship one flights. So the first two are the Captive Currey.  And Bryan Binney was the first to take the rocket motor, and will be my hero for being the first guy to hit the rocket fire button.
  I put this picture up, does anybody know the significance of the number N328 kilo fox trot?
>> It is 328,000 feet above sea level, so which also translates into 328 -- (speaker far from mic). 
>> I'm impressed, future aero nautical engineer, yes, that is 328,000 feet.
So the third, the third from the last flight.
The altitudes of each one of the flights is put above the airport.  So the third from the last flight, 328,000 feet.  So that was the first time when we went to space, Mike Novel took the flight, they are watching the altitude, and they just barely got to 328,000 feet.  And so barely over what is defineed as space.
  And there's a matrix, every pound that the spaceship one is over weight by, it cuts off 129 feet in altitude.  And after it landed, Burt says, it is a good thing you had a light breakfast this morning.
  (Laughter).
  So here is the break-through, Burt was concerned about safely reentering from space.  And one day, it came to him, if he folds the airplane in half, that can do a couple things for him.
It creates a very stable configuration, where it can reorient itself for reentry.
In the 60s, it had to orient itself carefully or it would break apart at an off angle coming back into the atmosphere.
  So you can reorient anyway way, it will reorient itself, and it gives a lot of drag, you need to decelerate as quickly as possible when you come back in.
  So it is an active, simple, and safe, and no active control required.
  This is the basic profile, when you drop, the boost is a minute, three and a half minutes in weightlessness, coming back in is a minute, the max deceleration is 5 and a half Gs, and the deceleration coming back in, but 16 seconds over 4Gs.  It is not that bad, relatively.  If you're a fighter pilot, it is not that bad.
  (Laughter).
  So, anyway.
Okay.
So, as we are getting closer and closer to flying this spaceship that folds in half, you know, these guys -- the bravest guys in the world to me are test pilots.
  I think the world of them.
And you don't want to call them scared, but they were curious.
(Laughter).
  And so, I could -- I could sense the tension.
So I went home, built a -- I'm really a modeler, I love modeling.  So I built a model of the spaceship one that can do a full feather.
Here's the feather.
There's the recovery.
Victory roll.
[Scratching noise].
(Laughter).
  (Applause).  
>> So the next day, I took it into scale and walked past Burt's office, hey, Burt, take a look at this.  I will fly it on the ramp.  And Burt said, let me look at it.  It is too flimsy, it is not going to fly.
Well, it flew okay yesterday.
  So we go to the ramp, I put it up, he launches it for me, do the full feather, and Burt was so excited, wait, I will have the test pilots line up and watch.
(Laughter).
  And it was like, see, I told you it would work!
(Laughter).
  And interesting, also, there was a university aero professor that contracted Burt that thought his feather design was a bad idea, it would break apart, and Burt said, we have done sub-scale RC model testing, and it works just fine.
  (Laughter).
  There was a concern about super Sonic reentry, and that was -- we said it was CFD.  There was no wind tunnel model ever done on spaceship one, it was CFD or model testing.
And so, you know, Burt's management style is pretty interesting.  He was able to paint this reality that laid out in front of us, and we were seduced by it, you fall into it and you are so excited and passionate and you're a believer.  I don't know how he cast that spell, but it is an amazing -- a lot of it, he gives people autonomy, people that he trusts, to, you know -- and he also trusts, if you have questions, you can come back and ask.  It is an interesting management style he has.  He always showed 100 percent confidence, and he had to, especially to the test pilot. 
(Laughter).
  I have never seen anybody work harder than him, too.
  One of the questions that I had, though, I said, Burt, I worked on a lot of composite structure, but not with a rocket motor back here, I don't know what it will do to the air frame.
Burt said, suspend it in silicon, and when you are space, the acoustics -- whatever.  He knew my concern.
  This is Burt Ritan in the back, and Julian and I liked the same slide, in the Milestones Gallery next to the X1 in the Smithsonian.
  That was 14 years ago, and Burt wanted to inspire kids, they wanted to touch it and be next to it.  A bunch of us rented buses to drive them out to watch historic space flights.  I would like to think that they are the engineers with what is currently happening, in Virgin and Bigelow, these are amazing programs.
  It would be interesting to see spaceship one fly in.
  Do you want to see it?
(Applause).
This is the economy version.
(Laughter).
(Applause).  
>> Oops, trying to do a roll.  Oh, well.
It needs some trimming, I think.
Oh, well.
(Laughter).
  >> My best feather imitation here.
(Laughter).
  >> That's a first at QCon.  So Dan and Julian will do a book signing after this, if you want to get a book, you can, and there will be an AMA session about spaceship one after that. 
>> Thank you for attending the keynote, the next sessions will begin at 10:35. 
Live captioning by Lindsay @stoker_lindsay at White Coat Captioning @whitecoatcapx.