June 2026 meetup - joint event with Seattle Systems
Details
Location hosted by Momento.
- Presentation 1 - Qu Chen (AWS) Modern Java applications built on relational databases often face a common challenge: as application traffic grows, read queries become the dominant source of database load. This is especially true for frequently accessed but infrequently updated data. Often times those queries require joins and aggregations across large data sets to fetch just a few rows of results. This can be very resource constraint and may even lead to performance issues. AWS Advanced JDBC wrapper presents a solution to this challenge by allowing caching query results from expensive and repetitive read queries to an in-memory cache like Valkey. You can dramatically reduce database load and improve query latency while maintaining or even improving application performance.
- Presentation 2 - Carl Sverre. Most programmers encounter property-based testing as “QuickCheck, but for pure functions.”
But what happens when the thing you want to test isn’t a function? What if it’s a distributed database, a consensus protocol, or an entire network of stateful services yelling at each other over TCP? This talk starts with classic property testing and scales the idea all the way up to Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST): controlling time, scheduling, crashes, retries, and randomness so entire systems become testable and searchable.
We’ll look at techniques and systems from QuickCheck, FoundationDB, TigerBeetle’s VOPR, Antithesis, and others, and explore the blurry line between testing, fuzzing, and lightweight formal methods.
This is a deep dive into how modern reliability testing actually works, aimed at people who enjoy distributed systems, weird bugs, and making computers fight for their lives in a hermetically sealed box of pain.