QCons are the place where senior software engineers, tech leads, and architects come together to learn, share, and push each other to drive innovation in the software industry.

The 8th edition of QCon New York (June 24-26, 2019) was no exception and featured software thought leaders discussing innovations from AWS (around control theory in practice at EC2), distributed tracing from the Jaeger tech lead, the hash realities of serverless today, and real advice on how Alibaba runs thousands of pods in a K8s cluster. In all, QCon NYC featured over 100 talks, workshops, panels, open spaces, and keynotes across three days.

In addition to deeply technical topics from some of software’s most innovative shops, there were talks on culture, personal growth, and team building (all with the lens of software engineering at its heart). The day three keynote presenter was Looker’s Nick Caldwell. Nick gave easily one of the most practical talks you’ll ever hear on Igniting the Fire of leadership in your teams. This talk featured “the golden question,” leadership traits, advice, and stories to inspire. If you watch nothing else from QCon NYC, take the time for this. Whether you’re a team lead or a team member, spend forty minutes with Nick and you’ll come away inspired and energized.

QCon NYC 2019 wasn’t just a software conference, it was the software conference where shops like Slack, Google, Uber, and Netflix opened their doors and connected with 1200 of the world’s most innovative engineers. There are more stories than we can list, but InfoQ reported (and recorded podcasts) with a number of speakers during the event. This article presents a summary of QCon New York as blogged and tweeted by attendees.

If you were at QCon NYC this year, thanks for joining us and making it so special. If you weren’t able to make it, we hope this summary helps you make the most of your time consuming the highlights. Our next English QCon is in San Francisco November 11-15th. QConSF 2019 features tracks on microservices, resiliency, front ends, edge computing, devops, team building, software supply chain, machine learning/AI, edge computing, and so much more. Join us!

QCon New York Key Takeaways

InfoQ also reported from the event, and recorded podcasts with a number of speakers. This article, however, presents a summary of QCon New York as blogged and tweeted by attendees.

Keynotes

• Ignite the Fire - How Managers Can Spark New Leaders by Nick Caldwell
• No Moore Left to Give: Enterprise Computing After Moore's Law by Bryan Cantrill

Tracks & Talks

21st Century Languages

• Making 'npm install' Safe by Kate Sills
• Multi-Language Infrastructure as Code by Joe Duffy

Architecting for Success when Failure is Guaranteed

• Graceful Degradation as a Feature by Lorne Kligerman
• How Did Things Go Right? Learning More From Incidents by Ryan Kitchens
• The Trouble With Learning in Complex Systems by Jason Hand
• What Breaks Our Systems: A Taxonomy of Black Swans by Laura Nolan

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

• Machine-Learned Indexes - Research from Google by Alex Beutel
• Scaling Infrastructure Engineering at Slack by Julia Grace
• Tackling Computing Challenges @CERN by Maria Girone
• Video Streaming at Scale by Lysa Banks

Building High-Performing Teams

• Context Matters: Improving the Performance and Wellbeing of Teams by Shawn Carney, Zofia Ciechowska
• High Performance Remote and Distributed Teams by Randy Shoup
• Navigating Complexity: High-Performance Delivery and Discovery Teams by Conal Scanlon

Data Engineering for the Bold

• A Dive Into Streams @LinkedIn With Brooklin by Celia Kung
• Datadog: A Real Time Metrics Database for One Quadrillion Points/Day by Ian Nowland
• Scaling DB Access for Billions of Queries Per Day @PayPal by Petrica Voicu, Kenneth Kang

Developing/Optimizing Clients for Developers

• Front End Architecture in a World of AI by Thijs Bernolet
• NYJavaSIG Meeting
• Not Sold Yet, GraphQL: A Humble Tale From Skeptic to Enthusiast by Garrett Heinlen

High-Performance Computing: Lessons from FinTech & AdTech

• Achieving Low-latency in the Cloud with OSS by Mark Price

Human Systems: Hacking the Org

• Liberating Structures @CapitalOne by Greg Myers
• Psychologically Safe Process Evolution in a Flat Structure by Christopher Lucian
• Using Bets, Boards and Missions to Inspire Org-Wide Agility by John Cutler

Machine Learning for Developers

• Panel: ML for Developers/SWEs by Hien Luu, Jeff Smith, Brad Miro, Ashi Krishnan
• Time Predictions in Uber Eats by Zi Wang

Microservices / Serverless (Patterns & Practices)

• Conquering Microservices Complexity @Uber With Distributed Tracing by Yuri Shkuro
• PracticalDDD: Bounded Contexts + Events => Microservices by Indu Alagarsamy
• The Not-So-Straightforward Road From Microservices to Serverless by Phil Calçado

Modern Java Innovations

• Are We Really Cloud-native? by Bert Ertman
• Java Futures, 2019 Edition by Brian Goetz
• Maximizing Performance with GraalVM by Thomas Wuerthinger
• The Trouble with Memory by Kirk Pepperdine

Modern CS in the Real World

• Leaving the Ivory Tower: Research in the Real World by Armon Dadgar
• PID Loops and the Art of Keeping Systems Stable by Colm MacCárthaigh
• The State of Serverless Computing by Chenggang Wu

Software Defined Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Service Meshes, & Beyond

• Introduction to SMI (the Service Mesh Interface) by Brendan Burns

Speaker AMAs (Ask Me Anything)

• AMA w/ Ashi Krishnan by Ashi Krishnan

Workshops

• Chaos Engineering in Practice by Matt Davis, James Wickett

Opinions about QCon

Takeaways

QCons are produced by InfoQ.com. With a deep focus on practitioner-driven content without the marketing fluff, each of our conferences is organized by an independent committee of expert software practitioners. We believe in real engineers talking about their successes and failures. The content you see above from QConNYC is a great example of what we’re about.

Our next English QCon is in San Francisco November 11-15th.

QCon New York 2019 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

Want to learn from the people moving our industry forward?
Join them at QConSF 2019.

QCon San Francisco (Nov 11-15) is the conference for senior software engineers and architects on the patterns, practices and use cases leveraged by the world's most innovative software shops (think Google, Netflix, BBC, AWS, Microsoft, Github). Don't miss the chance to gain insights and experiences from over 140 practitioner speakerswho can help you identify the right technology for your specific projects, avoid making the same mistakes they made and build your skills in the latest software practices.

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Platinum Sponsors

Call for Code is seeking solutions for this year’s Challenge. Head to the 2019 Challenge Experience and join.

Silver Sponsors

Azul Systems focuses exclusively on Java and the JVM. We build fully supported, standards-compliant runtimes that help enable Java-based businesses.	Bonita empowers DevOps teams to deliver and continuously improve process-based enterprise applications.
Open source workflow automation and platform, Camunda provides detailed visibility into business operations across distributed systems.	As the creator of the world’s first Engagement Database, Couchbase is revolutionizing digital innovation that enables businesses to deliver ever-richer and personalized customer experiences.
Decipher’s Grey Matter simplifies microservice and multi-cloud infrastructure design, development, and control while learning to optimize your network performance and cut cost.	Humio is a time-series log management solution for real-time monitoring and visualisation.
As the leading provider of Automatic Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions for microservices, Instana has developed the automatic monitoring and AI-based analysis DevOps needs to manage the performance of modern applications.	LightStep is reinventing APM for enterprises adopting microservices and serverless.
OverOps is an AIOps Reliability Platform that continuously analyzes applications at runtime to deliver actionable code-level insights and context into the quality of software across the application life-cycle.	Real-time, full-stack visibility and automation that guarantees SLAs and reliability for your infrastructure and applications.
SAP helps companies of all sizes and industries run better, operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit developers.sap.com	GoCD is a modern CI/CD tool that provides visibility into complex software deployments. Support for cloud environments like Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, Azure, and more.
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Bronze Sponsors

AppDynamics provides the business and operational insights into application performance, user experience, and business outcomes of your software applications.	Atomist is the software delivery machine for modern software teams who want visibility and control of every aspect of their craft.
Actionable metrics for engineering leaders.	Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for large-scale applications and infrastructure.
At Goldman Sachs, our Engineering teams build solutions to some of the most complex problems in the industry.	Increase resilience with Gremlin’s proactive failure testing tool that helps you identity weaknesses in your system before they become outages.
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Okta is the Identity Standard. The Okta Identity Cloud is an independent and neutral platform that securely connects the right technologies to the right people at the right time.	Snyk is a developer-first security solution that helps you use open source code and stay secure.
WhiteSource secures and manages open source components in your products.

Tech Lounge & Power Up Zone

GitLab is a single application for the entire software development lifecycle.	Open-Source Kubernetes Management.
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Women in Tech & Allies Breakfast Sponsors