Strangeloop 2015. I have been wanting to go to this conference for years.

Recorded talks

Talks

[keynote 1] Dedalus language “I see what you mean”

  • “Abstraction is sometimes harmful”
  • “[Ideally] You blow away the haystack and you see the shiny needles”
  • Having a professor do the keynote means you get a well-taught keynote.
  • askjeeves
  • abstraction, distributed systems on fire
  • “and then a million flowers will bloom”
  • “select bullshit from table where sql = ‘aaargh’ order by hate;”
  • the meaning of a program is what it does VS is the databases that make it true
  • meaning is just data
  • tshirt: create view mortal select * from human
  • “I’ve been seeing a lot of things on twitter where people think they know what programming languages are- or aren’t.”
  • “unfortunately. classic sql doesnt have a way to express recursion.”
  • datalog!!
  • http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-173.html
  • “many behaviors, one meaning”
  • hippiespeak
  • “Would the outupts still be good if I lost a replica?”
  • “Here’s a program that I don’t recommend that you write! it doesn’t have a unique meaning; it has two meetings- it depends on the order in which the data arrives and the rules fire.”
  • subtle HPMOR shoutout?
  • “I cant conclude something from something that I know, something you know, without us talking!”
  • “Can’t conclude from something I know, and something I don’t know yet…. or that I’ve forgotten”
  • state is induction over time
  • state is what makes the otherwise unlikely rondeavous of epherma possible
  • “the problem is… its an infinite-sided die”
  • existentialcomics.com/comic/98
  • replay-baseed debugging: if something bad happens, then its guaranteed to always happen!
  • Eoin Coffey ‏@ecoffey
  • “Rub some lamport clocks on it” -palvaro // @strangeloop_stl
  • “we dont really want to exponentiate over the network”
  • I will enjoy the transcript of this
  • “the world of meanings, where they ask if their program is correct”
  • language: bloom (new instead of dedalus), then blazes
  • “using their chaos animals!” netflix
  • eve - progrmming lang for non programmers
  • “when do we want it? eventually!”
  • committing acts of abstraction!
  • looking for phd students
  • http://witheve.com/
  • http://www.bloom-lang.net/calm/
  • http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~palvaro/molly.pdf
  • http://www.chris-granger.com/

strange&fast parsers with nom and rust:

isomorphic js

visualizing your code

  • omniscient debugging, riak with svg, library falafel- old and simple, walk abstract syntax tree
  • window splitting!
  • others: whyline, reacher
  • snapshotting and deterministic replay
  • store the sources of nondeterminism
  • timelapse(webkit) lets you do this well
  • symbols that make sense once youve seen them in context
  • 15 min for questions :/
  • http://janpaulposma.nl/#visualising-program-execution
  • good “the question is”

Bernhardt - ideology

  • (Ran into Dusty- speaking rather than attending)
  • “But since he was not a programmer, he was ok seeing only three boxes in the table”
  • sessions throwback: http://lanyrd.com/2009/strange-loop/
  • Watching #strangeloop talk about HTTP2 & Erlang re: chatterbox, hoorah for supervisor pattern on erlang vm
  • correctness, type vs
  • burrrn dynamic programmers- leap of faith that it works
  • “QuickCheck just makes more examples” haskell https://hackage.haskell.org/package/QuickCheck
  • hackernews.. theyll use more words and probably be meaner…
  • “but I need null!” this only mkaes sense if null is the only way to represent absence.
  • “before I was alive, I was wrong about this. I just needed to be a college student who liked arguing in order to - find out.”
  • “hurting people is bad”
  • if you could turn it into a fluid and pour it into a vessel, that vessel would be hackernews
  • film: “pervert’s guide to ideology”
  • destroyallsoftware.com/book
  • “There’s no assertion above the assertion, showing that the assertion is right.”

building scalable stateful services, by Cate

  • twitter! tech lead for observability
  • @caitie
  • amazing skirt
  • polished slides, presentation style
  • “Pick two… you don’t get to not pick partition tolerance, because physics”
  • No stickiness once the connection breaks
  • backpressure- machines can break connections when they’re overwhelmed.
  • pink text woo!
  • random placement
  • twitter’s ManhattanDB
  • Amazon’s DynamoDB
  • scuba - by facebook -
  • uber ringpop - nodejs library
  • Orleans - Actor Model - from xtreme programmign group at MSR
  • orleans distributes hash table
  • running almost-hot very fast because it could rebalance
  • “clients are not your friends. they are not going to do what you want them to.”
  • not user-noticeable so there was a pretty animation playing- distraaact
  • dynamic cluster membership?
  • slow rolling restart of the cluster- 12 hr
  • decouple memory

Art of service discovery at scale: (NiteshKant, netflix)

  • RxNetty
  • Zuul contributor
  • TODO me read https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/09/updates-for-facebook-notes/ (Zelinski)
  • do it by heartbeat? heartbeat returns service name and version? :p or other standard endpoint… howto do without - standard endpoint?
  • sending events to endpoint…. what about catastrophic shutodwn?
  • network partitions.. you can not-plan-for them, but - even inside one datacenter- you cant’ avoid em
  • heartbeat send to box-tracking server, vs heartbeat callable
  • unavailability can be trusted. node status voerride?
  • cap theorem
  • mi peeve: “gone wild” because it brings up images of spring break beach
  • do not evict if more than x% vanish
  • eureka
  • “If you were to have a takeaway”

Keynote - Activism (Idalin/Abby)

  • “give opportunities” [a certain type of]
  • bring to this conference- that ppl might not get anywhere else
  • “how you can get involved”
  • “to me” <3
  • inspiring
  • “push the needle” misinterpretable
  • “teachers didnt call on me because they couldnt say my name”
  • 19133 the poorest zip code in philadelphia
  • 75% dropout rate
  • more substitute teachers than actual teachers
  • forced to encounter the police all the time
  • couldn’t understand
  • went to prof- told her to drop out and go to middle school
  • she was asked to not come to study group “you keep us behind”
  • “My mom crowdfunded my first laptop [after almost dropping out of college]- back then, crowdfunding was knocking on - people’s doors”
  • statistics - because where are these? They never come to my hood
  • making more than my mom, dad, grandma combined- 50k
  • found out through google where the tech industry was
  • I got this- because this is bigger than me.
  • I packed the car with food, not clothes.
  • MBA at Mills college - social impact. and cs!
  • I never knew that I knew how to code- I thought that this was something that other people did.
  • India Rise - ran program - 80 students.
  • black girls code - goal a million
  • Interesting… audience….
  • politicsssss
  • “borderline in depression” cried for many days, not doing enough in the world. felt like my brother died.
  • winter 2014 - founders of Yes we code and Keynote labs - SJ hackathon
  • “What if an app could have saved treyvon martin”
  • interesting social media
  • “so many black deaths… couldn’t evn go to work feeling like ourselves.”
  • lots of
  • how does that rate compare?
  • rosa clemente
  • cussing on stage
  • powerful dude on twiter TefPoe
  • people shy away from danger
  • “without me knowing” er
  • fine for grass too high. generating revenue from fines.
  • 1/92 municipality in st louis
  • “I don’t agree, because if I agreed, I would have to do something.”
  • “bring in the help that they were trying to attract”
  • handsupunited.org
  • site for reporting police brutality - blog about this? tech solutions? Something like Caliope, maybe?
  • “we were being surveilanced”
  • “They arrested me for filming an arrest” #strangeloop @AbbyBobe
  • “a thousand retweets…. didn’t protect the people.”
  • “What would a tech program look like if the black panthers launched one?” use it to protect their people
  • “Taking the revolution to the cloud”
  • https://lockerdome.com/
  • Roy Clay Sr.
  • easy to discount
  • “I believe that you all have magic powers”
  • “revolutionary technology” - should only be for the people?
  • dreamdefenders
  • chant went surprisingly well

After hours

  • hangouts with TWers and zem, Idalin, <3 (technically the first time I hung out with a keynote speaker at a conference lol)

[After hours talk] continuous delivery and dependency management

Saturday

intro to keynote could be better.

Keynote

  • “embrace hopelessness, build confidence”
  • “three systems that I have built”
  • “Dharma talks”
  • dynodb postmoretem by amazon earlier this week
  • http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/
  • “Because otherwise people would not be able to do their jobs (tone of doom)”
  • distributed shared memory - which never works - appropriate- “oh god, no. just no”
  • “depending on specialty vendors for key parts of your system is a risky idea.”
  • “just the right access points to the data”
  • jgroups http://www.jgroups.org/ <- negative connotation
  • https://twitter.com/ri_cook/status/646800080595460096
  • “rewriting successful production systems is one of the hardest things to do.”
  • under-breath utterances
  • “If you don’t understand zookeeper, I have other talks on it, you can look at them”
  • TODO read zookeeper!
  • “Building our own distributed data store was not in scope”
  • sharks eating cables.
  • lookup. local zookeeper. writes go to local, reads go across the globe
  • “encode that somewhwer else- look like a global system but be a series of local systems”
  • “what are you saying when you make this joke?”
  • “you can also scale your humans! human, go build a service”
  • “People quitting is like hard drives failing at google. People move across the country, decide to become artists, - or just get sick of your shit.”
  • etto principle http://erikhollnagel.com/ideas/etto-principle/index.html
  • “death star” architecture diagrams
  • “You can always build a big ball of mud” “Silence comes via good design”
  • “humans fundamentally understand asynch. that the state of the world is always changing. People who are not tech - people are smarter than we give them credit for. They are unforgiving of errors related to money.”
  • Dharma talk- a bunch of examples to teach a principle.
  • even if you do something
  • “it’s fine. It’s fine.”
  • https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/87445919/Timeline.jpg
  • “test your freaking code”
  • TODO read http://trevmex.com/post/129868723083/apache-kafka-the-next-700-stream-processing

Streams!

  • All glory to the pipe operator!
  • https://twitter.com/pamasaur
  • there is definitely such a thing as infinite data
  • object literals
  • generators
  • indexes instead of values
  • babeljs
  • polyfill - In web development, a polyfill (or polyfiller) is downloadable code which provides - facilities that are not built into a web browser. It implements technology that a developer expects - the browser to provide natively, providing a more uniform API landscape.
  • baconjs, highlandjs, rsjs
  • baconjs
  • “I like when the words actually map to the constructs.”
  • https://streams.spec.whatwg.org/
  • https://gist.github.com/staltz/868e7e9bc2a7b8c1f754
  • fetchAPI https://fetch.spec.whatwg.org/
  • https://babeljs.io/
  • Jason Carr ‏@maudineormsby Folks at #strangeloop are oddly fond of saying “…because reasons.”
  • “If you’re a javascripter, you may have heard of… every single build system…” #strangeloop - #omgStreams
  • “My favorite is that millennial children become snakelets” ()
  • https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
  • get links from slides https://github.com/rackt/react-router/tree/master/examples
  • http://aster.is/projects/
  • TODO blog/research opensource pages of companies (via medium, because pictures?)
  • TODO js tutorial in console? import library and use it.
  • pamasaur
  • podcast turing incomplete

Transactions!!!!

  • https://martin.kleppmann.com/
  • https://speakerdeck.com/ept/transactions-myths-surprises-and-opportunities
  • ACID C is diffferent than C in CAP theorem :)
  • multi-object atomicity- rollback writes on request-rollbackability
  • plug in the names of all your things, and draw out a combination- lightning/latency/unreachable etc - for failure system modeling?
  • TODO me redo golang restful server in… some ruby thing?
  • neeeeed to switch languges for a bit.
  • IBM system R
  • I like the slides!
  • “I’m not qualified to talk about distributed systems, so there will be no pictures of things on fire.”
  • oreilly library
  • omgstreams
  • “repeatable read” sometimes means “snapshot isolation”
  • mvcc - multiversion concurrency control
  • oracle “serializable” mode is not serializable?
  • write skew (we saw this at BT- tried to minimize time between)
  • 2phase locking, pessimistic
  • (aside: http://nodebots.io/
  • http://hstore.cs.brown.edu/ VoltDB “H-Store is an experimental main-memory, parallel database - management system that is optimized for on-line transaction processing (OLTP) applications. It is a - highly distributed, row-store-based relational database that runs on a cluster on shared-nothing, main - memory executor nodes.”
  • Postgres
  • Philip Wadler
  • detect conflicts and abort
  • lisperati
  • postgres serializable
  • “at the price of preventing a lot of concurrency”
  • Paxos, Raft, Zalo
  • “We seem to be stuck in this place where there are no transactions (between different service)”
  • compensating transactions
  • detct and fix constraint violations - warehouse oversold, send discount codes
  • Failure jackinthe box (time goes backwards)
  • “still capture causality”
  • best talk to show to coworkers
  • lasp
  • programming SEC
  • “teach us to outgrow our madness”
  • CRDTs - every strangeloop ever
  • convergent programs
  • lattice processing
  • brief discussion uring morning keynote- choosing seats
  • Cartesian product of the set’s metadata
  • inflationary read - insures Lidsay Kruper
  • selective hearing (work in progress) - building on gossip protocol
  • endemic broadcast based runtime system
  • advertisement counter
  • unpublished appendix. what can the dataflow graph tell us about placement?
  • “it[what?] needs to ….commutative, idempotent and have the ability to be inverted”
  • map + filter = fold?
  • SyncFree
  • Distributes, eventually consistent

Performance engineering at MasterCard (*step)

  • Ted Boehm
  • “there’s a whole fraud business out there”
  • “organized crime at the most technical level”
  • history traits of card/region
  • A little too corporate
  • tiers
  • stresstest - fail, bottleneck io
  • tiers would outperform the testing tools
  • very general :/
  • found issues- no one had ever looked
  • Weird internal culture. Blame vs collaboration.
  • affinity level n server- receives and sends on different cpu
  • get rid of parallel gc, use CMS? - concurrent mark sweep https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/vm/- gctuning/cms.html
  • “flat response time” Zing vs Hotspot
  • https://support.azulsystems.com/hc/en-us/articles/200856690-How-is-Zulu-different-from-Azul-s-Zing-
  • http://www.azulsystems.com/sites/default/files//images/Azul_Performance_Brief_JBoss_Data_Grid_v4.pdf
  • Max pause repseon times zing vs hotspot
  • Talking about managers in a not complimentary way :/
  • “get funding from manager” does not sound like a cooperate environment”
  • He keeps saying “they”
  • “They don’t get that. Gotta make a simple graph.”
  • todo rate talks

Swift/objective-c (*walk)

  • Interop
  • big mapping layer
  • music slides
  • opportunty cost (of interop)
  • memory management
  • shims. isolated from nice implementation- take them out as soon as you don’t need them
  • Box
  • read swift code… write ipad app to make ipad useful? priorities app, plays music? :)
  • free function shim.
  • Generics
  • “This code doesn’t compile… or maybe it silently fails at runtime. I forget.”

distributed system

  • harvest and yield model
  • coda hale
  • Cook & Rasmussen model “going solid”
  • system safety - what we do under pressure
  • “so yeah, don’t kill people”
  • build support for continuous maintenance
  • reveal control of system to operators
  • know that it will be used in ways that you did not intend.
  • “Going solid”: a model of system dynamics and consequences for patient safety
  • Gerald Susman Borrill model Building Robus Systems
  • music paper
  • Netflix. Now with sparkles!
  • Chubby paper - key insights.
  • library vs service
  • trevmex’s notes for Matthias Felleisen’s talk
  • http://codahale.com/
  • http://developer.clearent.com/
  • cognitive diversity
  • SREcon Joao’s talk
  • “existing best practices won’t save you”
  • Faild - system-
  • ecmp Image result for ecmp
  • Equal-cost multi-path routing (ECMP) is a routing strategy where next-hop packet forwarding to a single destination - can occur over multiple “best paths” which tie for top place in routing metric calculations. https://en.wikipedia.- org/wiki/Equal-cost_multi-path_routing
  • keepalived - switches rather than hosts. Fake ip address, map to mac address, node fails, switch mac address.
  • I would ask you to show your work because maybe I think youre full of shit
  • “there are things that we will never be able to protect against”
  • TODO show this presentation to teammates, with explanatory notes
  • checksum things in memory as well as disc.
  • TODO think about the meetup group. get more co-sponsors. fb group.
  • Strangeloop diversity- STL is good for it. Two diversity talks. Lots of feamle attendees. Duty officer! <- - excellent excellent excellent. Code of conduct! Yes. Ratio is huge but I feel more yay than I have in similar situations.
  • Rantifesto
  • Architectural patterns of resilient distributed systems

closing talk: security

  • Citizen Lab https://citizenlab.org/
  • https://firstlook.org/ Dir of Security
  • Privacy and Coercion-Resistant design
  • used to be a pen tester
  • power plants, wanter nsaitation, airlines, google security…
  • KiwiCon new zealand :)
  • Snwden- the hero of the developers
  • systems thinking
  • number of strangeloop attenddees who return twice?
  • asmr for academic email
  • connotations of “hobbyist” - interesting thought
  • one time only - a jukebox, taking request
  • “freedom botherers, do-gooders”
  • Morgan
  • re-broaden
  • “My computer was arrested before I was.”
  • “In my end of the woods, attribution is tricky”
  • BahrainWatch foundation FinFisher patient-zero
  • dnt get any idea… i woudl be really pissed if taht were the takeaway of this talk.
  • where do the transcripts go? do want.
  • hacking team
  • paper: the smartphone who loved me
  • Security for Humans: Privacy and Coercion Resistant Design
  • Morgan Marquis-Boire
  • http://www.thestrangeloop.com/2015/security-for-humans-privacy-and-coercion-resistant-design.html
  • I’m looking at my phoen and I start thinking about putting it in the fridge. Aaaah, I’ve become one of those - people. Odd trust relationship- first thing in the mroning, last thing before bed.
  • teleStrategies ISS WOrld
  • “Wiretappers Ball” in DC
  • BlueCoat https://www.bluecoat.com/
  • Some devices wander by mistake: planet blue coat redux
  • I mean, how petty cana state be? the answer is very.
  • “the trail was greasy and kind of cold. I did what I could, and kept the data…” - vietanamese govt surveillance - practices
  • Chris Mronitt- article author. associated press, in hanoi, got a doc -
  • So journalists need a constantly-reflashable machine, that can access anonymous email- fwd each article recieved to - a new address before opening it?
  • non-legitamate targets, non-combatants. activists, journalists, last public work before leaving google.
  • hacking team
  • “AM I just doing free QA for these people?” (hacking team)
  • “This stuff is kind of grim, so I like to stick pictures of kittens in my slides.”
  • whispersystems
  • silent circle
  • cryptophone
  • recommends movie The Lives of Others
  • GCHQ
  • eve’s older, meaner sister Mallory. MITM at scale- if you own the wires. put a rack in data center. isolate traffic - stream, inject into download of binary, and change it.
  • ;arge service, find out ppl actively exploiting it to protect your sers.
  • “I would inject the hell out of people who use my guest wireless.”
  • you want it to me so stable that it can run at the same time as the kernel code of the russian hackers, and still - not crash!
  • todo watch that cartoon that Z likes to make my brain happy again someday.
  • todo go to writing meetup
  • rubber hose cryptography. costs political cachet.
  • advanced russia persistent china threat israel
  • pay-for-tools tier
  • “never underestimate someone who is cash poor but time rich. when will they stop? we dontt know. this person might - be pissed forever.”
  • bubble wrap inside the door under the carpet
  • “which kind of makes me a little- uncharitable, shall we saw.”
  • the security community is traditionally great at designing unusable systems
  • coercion-resistant design
  • Bitlocker BitLocker (codenamed Cornerstone and formerly known as Secure Startup) is a full disk encryption feature - included with select editions of Windows Vista and later. It is designed to protect data by providing encryption - for entire volumes.
  • lavabit shut down
  • skype
  • xbox, WoW also etc
  • DNSsec root key

The story of how I got a ticket

I put the ticket sale on my calendar, but they sold out in just a few hours and I did not realize that this would happen, so I checked on day 2 or thereabouts. I put myself on the waitlist, which did eventually work, although I had a ticket by then so I bought it under my friend’s name who had also missed the original sale, and whose waitlist slot had not come up yet. I asked on twitter whether anyone had a ticket, and I was answered by someone who said that their friend had one… we coordinated via email, I sent $700 (100 of which he later returned, since StrangeLoop waived ticket transfer fees) via squarecash to a mostly-stranger, and everything went great! Since hotels were sold out and/or expensive, I stayed in an airbnb about a 15-minute drive away, and used lyft/uber. Next time, I will try to get hotel + tickets much sooner!

People (I’ve run into):

  • Pete (while boarding the plane)
  • zem (travel buddy)
  • two speakers on the train (js for robots, and js … isomorphic js)
  • some guy in a groupon hackathon shirt on the train
  • Amanda, Ryan
  • Ray Hightower :)
  • Some… people… former TWers?
  • Ron <3
  • Spargo <3
  • Dusty (groupon) + 2 companions
  • Lady from adobe, priorly of startup
  • amazon/heroku awesome lady (Courtney) Seattle. Velocity NY
  • andconf dude
  • double union lady
  • Nick from BT (Saw Dan also)
  • After-conference playing of card games: girl who works at Continuity (ruby), guy Scott who is managing an eng org (python)
  • Zendo people! Juliene George Patrick James Ethan
  • shoutout to the guy who awkwardly sat right next to me for the first keynote for unknown reasons despite the isle seat he could have had what was your deal I don’t even

Booths are hard

I have opinions on how to do a really good technical booth at a conference, but no evidence. Some nopes: don’t pass out shirts without - explanation- unless that’s the best- they’ll research it when they wear it- have a lot of - ‘discoverable’ info- don’t have booth-minders who aren’t paying attention, it will get literally less attention than if they weren’t there.

Other notes

  • Riot Games Engineering blog
  • broke my phone at the museum. Whoops
  • $ estimate per talk- conf fee minus food- 30/talk? Good deal on average :)
  • Rakudo is an implementation of perl6