SREcon Europe 2017: impressions

Earlier this month I went to SREcon Europe in Dublin. This was my non-Ruby conference, and it was quite different from the conferences I attended before. I decided to write a short post with my impressions and links to talks that I liked the most.

The conference takes three days and each day has 4-5 tracks. That’s almost as huge as RailsConf (which is up to 7 tracks). Sometimes I found it hard to choose between talks, especially when you had to forgo three talks to attend a two hour workshop.

Speaking of workshops, SREcon was full of them! Even that I couldn’t stay for all workshops, I think the variety of them was quite diverse: Statistics for Engineers, Mastering Linux performance tools, Introduction to gRPC and Technical Writing. I was told that at least two of them take place on every SREcon which is pretty cool.

Overall, the conference was not as technical heavy as I expected. There were maybe a couple presentations with the code, and the rest were either about system design (e.g. load balancing) either about about soft skills like communication and incident management.

Dublin seemed like a great place for conferences. Thanks to many tech companies based there, there were many local engineers at the conference. It was fun to hang out with locals and visit Facebook and Intercom offices (thanks Javier and Anatoly!).

Some of my favourite talks:

And of course, talks by my colleagues at Shopify:

I’d recommend you to go to SREcon especially if you interested in learning about Site Reliability Engineering practices. The conference is a great fit for someone from a relatively small, fast-growing company, who’d like to establish SRE culture in a startup.

Thanks to Shopify Engineering for sponsoring my trip.

Written in September 2017.
Kir Shatrov

Kir Shatrov helps businesses to grow by scaling the infrastructure. He writes about software, scalability and the ecosystem. Follow him on Twitter to get the latest updates.