Each November in San Francisco, 1,600 senior software engineers and architects transform the Hyatt Regency off Embarcadero into the epicenter of software. QCon San Francisco 2019, the 13th edition of the International Software Conference that visits the Bay Area annually, was no exception.

This year’s conference featured 177 speakers, track hosts, workshop presenters, and committee members. These are people like one of the foremost thinkers in the DevOps movement John Willis, CEO/Co-Founder of DarkLang Ellen Chisa, and VP Cloud Architecture Strategy @AWSCloud Adrian Cockcroft.

The conference kicked off with an opening keynote from Pat Helland. Pat is the principal software architect at Salesforce where he works on cloud-based, multi-tenant database systems. He is also legend in software when it comes working distributed systems. You may have read some of his past work in the ACM Queue including Immutability Changes Everything, Consistently Eventual, and Identity by Any Other Name.

Pat’s QCon San Francisco opening keynote was Mind Your State for Your State of Mind and considered how distinct application patterns have grown over time to leverage different types of distributed stores. The talk concluded with a set of actionable takeaways including "Different applications demand different behaviors from durable state." So ask yourself, "Do you want it right ("read your writes") or do you want it right now (bounded and fast SLA)?"

Over the following three days (and the additional two workshop days) there were tracks on building socially conscious software, including Alex Qin’s How Do We Heal?, understanding the software supply chain in today’s containerized world, including GitHub’s Nickolas Means’ Securing Software From the Supply Side and diving into the languages of infrastructure, with talks like Lachlan Evenson’s Helm 3: A Mariner's Delight.

A personal highlight of mine came in the track I hosted (Living On The Edge: The World of Edge Compute From Device to Infrastructure Edge). Long time QCon attendee Vasily Vlasov of Netflix’s Cloud Gateway team, gave his first QCon talk, to rave reviews. It earned one of my top five recommendations of day 3.

After three intensive days chatting, discussing, and learning from some of today’s leading minds in software, it ended with the perfect closing keynote. Dr Pamela Gay is a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute where she’s mapping the surface of celestial objects. She’s part of the team that worked to find where they could land a spacecraft on a 500m wide asteroid tumbling through space. Her talk was about the limitations of AI and how science needs citizen scientists to crowdsource the massive amount of work involved. Her talk (and transcript) is available now on InfoQ. If you haven’t seen it yet, take 45 minutes and prepare to be inspired.

As always, some members of InfoQ's team of practitioner-editors were present and wrote a number of posts about the event. Below we've summarized the key takeaways and highlights as blogged and tweeted by attendees. Over the course of the next several months, InfoQ will be publishing the majority of the conference sessions online.

QCon San Francisco Key Takeaways

This article presents a summary of QCon San Francisco as blogged and tweeted by attendees.

Keynotes

• Microcultures and Finding Your Place by Mike McGarr
• Mind Your State for Your State of Mind by Pat Helland
• When Machine Learning Can't Replace the Human by Pamela Gay

Tracks & Talks

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

• Secrets at Planet-Scale: Engineering the Internal Google KMS by Anvita Pandit

Building & Scaling High-Performing Teams

• Mistakes and Discoveries While Cultivating Ownership by Aaron Blohowiak
• Passion, Grace, & Fire - The Elements of High Performance by Josh Evans
• The Focusing Illusion of Developer Productivity by Courtney Hemphill

Ethics, Regulation, Risk, and Compliance

• Ethics Landscape by Theo Schlossnagle

Languages of Infrastructure

• Automated Testing for Terraform, Docker, Packer, Kubernetes, and More by Yevgeniy Brikman

Living on the Edge: The World of Edge Compute from Device to Infrastructure Edge

• Machine Learning on Mobile and Edge Devices With TensorFlow Lite by Daniel Situnayake
• Self-Driving Cars as Edge Computing Devices by Matt Ranney

Microservices Patterns & Practices

• Controlled Chaos: Taming Organic, Federated Growth of Microservices by Tobias Kunze
• Managing Failure Modes in Microservice Architectures by Adrian Cockcroft
• Stateful Programming Models in Serverless Functions by Chris Gillum
• User & Device Identity for Microservices @ Netflix Scale by Satyajit Thadeshwar

Modern Data Architectures

• Future of Data Engineering by Chris Riccomini
• Taming Large State: Lessons From Building Stream Processing by Sonali Sharma, Shriya Arora

Optimizing Yourself: Human Skills for Individuals

• Optimizing Yourself: Neurodiversity in Tech by Elizabeth Schneider

Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking

• Mapping the Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems by Cat Swetel

Production Readiness: Building Resilient Systems

• Observability in the Development Process: Not Just for Ops Anymore by Christine Yen

Socially Conscious Software

• Holistic EdTech & Diversity by Antoine Patton
• Impact Starts With You by Julia Nguyen

Software Supply Chain

• Shifting Left with Cloud Native CI/CD by Christie Wilson
• The Common Pitfalls of Cloud Native Software Supply Chains by Daniel Shapira

Trust, Safety & Security

• Exploiting Common iOS Apps’ Vulnerabilities by Ivan Rodriguez
• Reflecting on a Life Watching Movies and a Career in Security by Jason Chan
• Security Culture: Why You Need One and How to Create It by Masha Sedova
• Small Is Beautiful: How to Improve Security by Maintaining Less Code by Natalie Silvanovich

Sponsored Solutions Track V

• 3 Common Pitfalls in Microservice Integration and How to Avoid Them by Niall Deehan

Unofficial Events

• Women in Tech & Allies Breakfast (Co-Sponsored by Netflix) by Wade Davis

Opinions about QCon

Takeaways

InfoQ produces QCons in 8 cities around the globe (including our newest edition QCon Munich). Our focus on practitioner-driven content is reflected in each committee’s unique make up. The program committee of leading software engineers and leaders meets for 30 weeks to individually select each speaker at QCon. The next QCon is well underway and takes place in London March 2-6, 2020. We will return to San Francisco November 16-20, 2020.

QCon San Francisco 2019 Publishing Schedule

Check out full videos on InfoQ.com

Videos of most presentations were available to attendees within 48 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 San Francisco website. There are also numerous QCon photos on our Facebook page.

Next QCon

Join us at QCon London
March 2-6, 2020

The 14th QCon London 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; Kubernetes and Cloud Architectures; Building High Performing Teams; Next Generation Microservices; The Latest Innovations in Machine Learning, Streaming Data Architectures, JavaScript: Pushing the Client Beyond the Browser, are just some of the tracks for this year’s conference.

Early bird pricing ends Jan 24th!
Save £395 when you use “INFOQ20”!

Platinum Sponsors

Create intelligent, disruptive cloud-based applications with developer tools from IBM. Whether you're exploring AI, IoT, or blockchain, we can help you build applications capable of changing the world.

Silver Sponsors

Transforming billions of data points into one impact alert.	Auth0 is a universal identity platform made by developers, for developers. Never compromise.
Azul Systems focuses exclusively on Java and the JVM. We build fully supported, standards-compliant runtimes that help enable Java-based businesses.	Open source workflow automation and platform, Camunda provides detailed visibility into business operations across distributed systems.
Checkr provides modern and compliant background checks for global enterprises and startups.	Actionable metrics for engineering leaders.
Creator of the world’s first Engagement Database, Couchbase is revolutionizing digital innovation that enables businesses to deliver ever-richer and personalized customer experiences.	Trace every connection in a distributed application with negligible overhead, no sampling, and no code changes.
In-memory computing technology that delivers performance at scale.	Humio is a time-series log management solution for real-time monitoring and visualization.
Karat conducts highly predictive technical interviews that power world-class hiring processes for leading organizations.	LightStep is reinventing APM for enterprises adopting microservices and serverless.
MariaDB frees companies from the costs, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, supporting transactional, analytical or hybrid implementations, on commodity hardware or in the cloud.	Redis Labs is the home of Redis and commercial provider of Redis Enterprise, the world’s most popular in-memory database platform.
Quickly triage and resolve issues through cross-stack visibility and deep context about errors.	Site24x7 empowers IT operations and DevOps with AI-powered performance monitoring.
Solace is an event broker that supports pub/sub, queuing, request/reply and streaming using open APIs and protocols.	Become a modern digital business.
Making software reliable.	WhiteSource secures and manages open source components in your products.
Integration agility for digitally driven organizations.

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.
Full stack stability monitoring platform for data-driven decisions on when to write code vs debug.	CryptoMove is the world’s first data protection platform to utilize globally patented moving target defense (MTD) protection solutions to protect API keys, configs, kubernetes and other secrets.
Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for large-scale applications and infrastructure.	DataStax delivers the only active everywhere hybrid cloud database built on Apache Cassandra™.
Increase resilience with Gremlin’s proactive failure testing tool that helps you identity weaknesses in your system before they become outages.	Dev and Ops teams use our feature management platform to separate code deployments from feature releases, and eliminate risk from their development cycles.
Adopt and operate microservices, service mesh and serverless at the pace and control of your business with Solo.io.	Split powers your product decisions with a unified solution for feature flagging and experimentation.
Tidelift makes open source work better—for everyone. We work directly with maintainers to provide a single source for proactively-managed open source components.	VividCortex provides deep database performance monitoring to drive speed, efficiency and savings.

Power Up Zone

Women in Tech & Allies Breakfast Sponsors