March, 17, 2024 archives

Today was the last day of SCALE 21x. Again I didn’t make it out for the opening keynote, and I just took a quick spin around the expo floor to see it looking sort of quiet and winding down.

The first talk I attended was Jonathan Haddad on“Distributed System Performance Troubleshooting Like You’ve Been Doing it for Twenty Years” where he shared some of his insights from doing that the title said for companies like Apple and Netflix. His recommendation for greenfield deployments was to have Open Telemetry set up to collect traces and logs, and he was also a big fan of the BPF Compiler Collection (aka bcc-tools) for getting a realtime look into system issues. He was not a fan of running databases in containers, and even less of a fan of running them within Kubernetes. (You could almost see his eye twitch.)

The last talk that I attended (there were just two slots today) was Jen Diamond on “The Git-tastic Power of Conventional Commits.” It was a good talk that used a little light lexical analysis to explain the basic concepts of working with Git (and the revelation that it stands for “ global information tracker” although now a little more research shows that’s only sort-of true). This all led into talking about Conventional Commits which is a way of structuring commit messages, and how you could use that in automations and in driving semantic-versioning in the release process.

The final session was a closing keynote from Bill Cheswick titled “I Love Living in the Future: Half a Century of Computers, Software, and Security” but really could have just been “give the old guy the microphone and let him go!” I left a little over two hours ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he’s still going. I hope they let him take a bathroom break.