WWC and YOW! special event

Three speakers from YOW! are joining us to give talks! We’re excited to have such great speakers lined up for you and we hope you’ll join us for an evening of technical learning :)

The Fallacy of Fast, Ines Sombra

We all want to move fast. We construct our systems in a rapidly-iterating and agile way. Ideally we design and build them to be efficient, robust, and have low latency. But sometimes in the search for speed we make mistakes that come back to haunt us.

The talk is about the things most of us sacrifice when trying to iterate fast. Some of these are reasonable trade-offs — others can wreck your product. I hope you will walk away with a notion of what to pay attention to at various stages of software development, and how you can avoid common pitfalls.

Principles of Evolutionary Architecture, Rebecca Parsons

With business models and business needs changing so rapidly, an adaptable architecture is critical to allow systems to cope with change. Historically, adaptability has been sought through anticipating the places where a system must be adaptable and through various architectural approaches. However, recent experiences have shown these approaches to be inadequate, at least as currently practiced. This talk presents some principles of evolutionary architecture that allow systems to respond to change without needing to predict the future. We then describe some approaches that realize these principles and discuss how these approaches support adaptability of systems in an evolutionary way.

So We Hear You Like Papers: Eventual Consistency, Caitie McCaffrey

Distributed Systems has been an active area of research since the 1960s, and many of the problems we face today in our industry have already had solutions proposed, and have inspired new research. In this talk I'll focus on Eventual Consistency and go through a series of papers that have changed my perspective and helped shape the way I think about building large scale distributed systems.

Rough Agenda

• 6:00pm: Arrive & Food

• 6:30pm: Short intro

• 6:45pm: Talks

• 8:30pm: Clean up and head out

Prior development experience required: none, although some of the topics are quite technical.

About the speakers

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra is a Distributed Systems Engineer at Fastly, where she spends her time helping the Web go faster. Ines holds an M.S. in Computology with an emphasis on Cheesy 80’s Rock Ballads. She has a fondness for steak, fernet, and a pug named Gordo. In a previous life she was a Data Engineer. Follow Ines @randommood

Rebecca Parsons

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is the CTO at ThoughtWorks. She has more than 30 years’ experience in leading the creation of large-scale distributed, services based applications, and the integration of disparate systems.

Before ThoughtWorks, she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida, after completing a Director’s Post Doctoral Fellowship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Her interests include parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, domain specific languages, evolutionary architecture, genetic algorithms, and computational science.

Rebecca received a BS in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, and both an MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

Caitie McCaffrey

Caitie McCaffrey is a Backend Brat and Distributed Systems Diva at Twitter. Prior to that, she spent the majority of her career building large-scale services and systems that power the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO. Caitie has a degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and has worked on several video games including Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, Halo 4, and Halo 5 She maintains a blog at CaitieM.com and frequently discusses technology on Twitter @Caitie