Back to QCon: Day 3

When Wesley Reisz, the conference organizer stood on the stage to introduce the closing keynote, he said he was surprised to see so many people stayed till that late, eagerly waiting for the last awesome talk. For me, I stayed because Day 3 was even more informative, all the talks I went to were excellent, I coundn’t imagine missing any chance to learn more even I already felt information overloaded.

The first talk I went to was by 2 engineers from Coinbase. Last year when cryptocurrency suddenly drew public attention (again), they experienced eye-catching SEV. Good news is, they quickly switched their gear to build infrastructure up, not only to survive the very first sudden increase, but built up their muscle to survive more and more significant traffice spikes.

Then I went to an AMA from Charity Majors, a former Facebooker and current CEO of Honeycomb. Later I went to her talk about “test in production” as well. Charity is really good at speaking that she keep conveying her thoughts endlessly without the slides being projected to the big screen, and her slides are really organized in highly unorganized way(think of Ulysses, which I didn’t read). But I agree with her points: yes, you may not realize, but you test in production, and you should do it, it’s not evil, you just have to do it right, which is not easy. I don’t think every attendee agreed but if I am asked to recommend only one talk in all QCon talks, this is most likely my answer.

Another great talk was from Jason Maude @Starling Bank. I went to the talk partly because it reminds me of last year’s great talk from Nubank, another technical startup which carries a banking license(and partly because I have a favorite spots in that meeting room to charge my phone, never mind). The difference Sterling Bank they made is, they don’t adopt frameworks like the popular Kafka, or some git-style DB(Datomic) Nubank adopted, they just use Java, and make things happen. So yes, it doesn’t matter what fancy frameworks or technologies you use, it matters that you get things done right.

This is the last note of all my QCon notes. This is it, but the journey of learning is one percent finished.