Conferences often have a theme that emerges during their course that none of us had predicted. One year at QCon London it was, bizarrely, cat pictures; every presentation you went to had a cat picture in it. Another year, as the microservices movement was just getting going, it seemed that we had mandated a Conway’s law slide in every presentation - we hadn't of course, but there certainly were plenty of them.

This year, at the seventh annual QCon New York, our second year in Time Square, it felt like it was diversity and inclusion. The event had a particularly positive atmosphere that made for something truly special, and we got a huge amount of positive feedback from attendees and speakers about it, both during the event and afterwards. This is something the QCon team has worked on for several years, and it felt wonderful to see that work starting to pay dividends.

From a content perspective, attendees at the event got to see keynotes from Guy Podjarny co-founder of Snyk, talking about "Developers as a Malware Vehicle", Joshua Bloch giving a "Brief, Opinionated History of the API", and Tanya Reilly, Principal Engineer of Squarespace, giving a thoroughly interesting and unusual talk about the history of fire escapes in New York City and what we as software engineers can learn from them.

In total we had 143 speakers across the 117 sessions, workshops, AMAs, Open Spaces and mini-workshops. Topics included containers and orchestration, machine learning, ethics, modern user interfaces, microservices, blockchain, empowered teams, modern Java, DevEX, Serverless, chaos and resilience, Go, Rust, Elixir, and security.

QCon New York Key Takeaways

This article presents a summary of QCon New York as blogged and tweeted by attendees.

Keynotes

• A Brief, Opinionated History of the API
• Developers as a Malware Distribution Vehicle
• The History of Fire Escapes

Tracks & Talks

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

• Canopy: Scalable Distributed Tracing & Analysis @Facebook
• Lyft's Envoy: Embracing a Service Mesh
• Scaling Push Messaging for Millions of Devices @Netflix

Chaos, Complexity, and Resilience

• UNBREAKABLE: Learning to Bend but Not Break at Netflix
• Using Chaos To Build Resilient Systems

Container and Orchestration Platforms in Action

• Control Planes: Designing Infrastructure for Rapid Iteration
• Forced Evolution: Shopify's Journey to Kubernetes

Developer Experience: Level up Your Engineering Effectiveness

• Help! I Accidentally Distributed My System!
• Succession: A Refactoring Story

Empowered Teams

• Empowering Agile Self-organized Teams with Design Thinking

Ethics in Computing

• Data, GDPR & Privacy: Doing It "Right" Without Losing It All
• Ethics in Computing, From Academia to Industry
• Organizing for Your Ethical Principles
• Privacy Ethics – A Big Data Problem

Finding the Serverless Sweetspot

• Observability to Better Serverless Apps
• Serverless Patterns and Anti-Patterns

Microservices: Patterns & Practices

• Complex Event Flows in Distributed Systems
• Debugging Microservices: How Google SREs Resolve Outages
• Designing Events-first Microservices
• Design Microservice Architectures the Right Way
• No Microservice Is an Island

Modern Java Reloaded

• Effective Java, Third Edition - Keepin' it Effective
• Invest in Your Java Katalogue

Modern User Interfaces: Screens and Beyond

• Rethinking HCI With Neural Interfaces @CTRLlabsco
• Smart Speakers: Designing for the Human

Real World Security

• Making Security Usable: Product Engineer Perspective

Ask Me Anything and Open Space

• AMA w/ Joshua Bloch
• Mob Programming Mini Workshop

Opinions about QCon

Takeaways

QCons are produced by InfoQ.com. Our focus on practitioner-driven content is reflected in the fact that the program committee that selects the talks and speakers is itself comprised of technical practitioners from the software development community. Our next English QCon is in San Francisco November 5-9.

QCon New York 2018 Publishing Schedule

Check out full videos on InfoQ.com

Videos of most presentations were available to attendees within 24 hours of them being filmed, and we have already begun to publish them on the InfoQ site. You can view the publishing schedule on the QCon New York website. There are also numerous QCon photos on our Facebook page.

Next QCon

Join us at QCon San Francisco
November 5 - 9, 2018

The 12th QCon San Francisco is a 3-day conference + 2 workshop days with over 140 talks in many different tracks and topics, that allows developers to discover what they don’t know ... but should know in software development. Architectures from Netflix, Google, Facebook, Twitter; Applied AI & Machine Learning; Data Engineering for the Modern Age; Containers; Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking; Javascript & Web Tech are just some of the tracks for this year’s conference.

Early bird pricing ends Aug 17th!
Save $730 when you use “INFOQ100”!

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