In mid November around 1,600 attendees descended on the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco for the twelfth annual QCon in the city.

QCon SF attendees - software engineers, architects, and project managers from a wide range of industries including some prominent Bay-area companies - attended 99 technical sessions across 6 concurrent tracks, 13 ask me anything sessions with speakers, 18 in-depth workshops, and 8 facilitated open spaces.

We’ve already started publishing sessions from the conference, along with transcripts for the first time. The full publishing schedule for presentations can be found on the QCon SF website.

The conference opened with a presentation from Jez Humble & Nicole Forsgren, two of the authors of “Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations” – one of InfoQ’s recommended books for 2018.

Some members of InfoQ's team of practitioner-editors were present and filed a number of stories about the event, but the main focus for this article is the key takeaways and highlights as blogged and tweeted by attendees.

QCon San Francisco Key Takeaways

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

Keynotes

• Building thae Enchanted Land
• Finding Purpose Through the Things We Build
• If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, It Doesn’t Matter How Fast You Get There
• Using Data Effectively: Beyond Art and Science

Tracks & Talks

21st Century Languages

• Go - A Key Language in Enterprise Application Development?
• Kotlin: Write Once, Run (Actually) Everywhere
• WebAssembly: Neither Web Nor Assembly, But Revolutionary

Applied AI & Machine Learning

• Fairness, Transparency, and Privacy in AI @LinkedIn

Architectures You've Always Wondered About

• Airbnb's Great Migration: From Monolith to Service-Oriented
• Netflix Play API - An Evolutionary Architecture
• Paying Technical Debt at Scale - Migrations @Stripe
• Real-World Architecture Panel 1
• Scaling Slack - The Good, the Unexpected, and the Road Ahead
• What We Got Wrong: Lessons From the Birth of Microservices

Developer Experience: Level up your Engineering Effectiveness

• Evolving Continuous Integration: Applying CI to CI Strategy
• Helping Developers to Help Each Other

Enterprise Languages

• Building a Reliable Cloud Based Bank in Java

JavaScript & Web Tech

• npm and the Future of JavaScript

Microservices / Serverless Patterns & Practices

• Crisis to Calm: Story of Data Validation @ Netflix
• From Winning the Microservice War to Keeping the Peace
• Reactive DDD—When Concurrent Waxes Fluent

Modern CS in the Real World

• Artwork Personalization @Netflix

Modern Operating Systems

• Is It Time to Rewrite the Operating System in Rust?
• The Operating System in 2018

Optimizing You: Human Skills for Individuals

• Incrementally Refactoring Your Habits With Psychology

Practices of DevOps & Lean Thinking

• DevOps For The Database
• Service Ownership @Slack
• Full Cycle Developers @Netflix
• Whispers in the Chaos: Monitoring Weak Signals

Production Readiness: Building Resilient Systems

• Building Production-Ready Applications
• Building Resilience in Production Migrations
• Yes, I Test In Production (And So Do You)

Socially Conscious Software

• Design Strategies for Building Safer Platforms
• FreshEBT.
• Managing Values-Driven Open Source Projects
• Software Love Languages (On Passion & Product)

Sponsored Solutions Track I

• Observability: The Health of Every Request

Opinions about QCon

Takeaways

InfoQ produces QCons in 6 cities around the globe. 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 QCon will be in London March 4-8, 2019 . We will return to San Francisco April 15-17 2019 with QCon.ai, our event focussed on machine learning and AI for developers.

QCon San Francisco 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 San Francisco website. There are also numerous QCon photos on our Facebook page.

Next QCon

Join us at QCon.ai San Francisco
April 15-17, 2019

Do you want to uncover the real-world practices and uses cases for applying artificial intelligence and machine learning in engineering? Join us at QCon.ai, our applied AI conference for Developers Apr 15 - 17, 2019 in San Francisco.

Early bird pricing ends Jan 12th!
Save $290 when you use “INFOQAI19”!

Platinum Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

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Bronze Sponsors

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