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:
- Anycast Is Not Load Balancing by Murali Suriar
- The Dangers of Being Overly-Paranoid by Ingrid Epure
- Deploying Changes to Production in the Age of the Microservice by Samantha Schaevitz
- Automated Debugging of Bad Deployments by Joe Gordon
- Why Work with a Tech Writer? by Betsy Beyer
And of course, talks by my colleagues at Shopify:
- Bots Are Fast, Humans Are Smarter by Felix Glaser
- Resiliency Testing with Toxiproxy by Jake Pittis
- Incident Management and Chatops at Shopify by Daniella Niyonkuru
- Building an On-Premise Kubernetes Cluster For a Large Web Application by Daniel Turner
- Make Haste Slowly: Balancing SRE Diligence in Urgency Driven Organizations by Jason Hiltz-Laforge
- Standing On the Shoulders of Giants: Unleashing the Power of Scriptable Load Balancers by Emil Stolarsky
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.
