6 videos from TechSummit Amsterdam 2017 (Jun 1st)

A couple of weeks ago some of us went to the TechSummit conference organized by LeaseWeb.  Here is a list of the talks that I attended, along with a short description for each.

The first presentation was “Shaving my head made me a better programmer” by Alex Qin, which was about what it is like to be a woman, and specifically a programmer, in the U.S. tech industry.  (And in the University before that.)  She talked about the inequality, the sexism, and the harassment.   She mentioned that she once gave a talk in a really big conference about accessibility in the U.S., and afterwards she was asked “How do I talk to women at bars?”  The head-shaving part refers to how changing her appearance resulted in being taken more seriously.  It was quite an interesting talk, though I suspect that in Amsterdam, she was to a large extent preaching to the choir.

 

The next presentation was about “Least privilege container deployment” by D. Monica from Docker.

As you understand, it was mostly about security.  He spoke about six tools that have been developed by the guys at Docker that can be used to provision and manage resources in a distributed system while maintaining security.  These tools are infraKit, linuxKit, runC, containerD, Notary and swarmKit, none of which I had ever heard of before.

The next presentation was “Why you should run performance tests in the cloud or on CDN”, by J. van Gaalen.

I attended this one because I have an interest in performance testing, as I am participating in the Performance CoP, but I did not find it as interesting as I had hoped. (No surprises and no eye-opening revelations there.)  The talk focused on the single big-bang event scenario, where you normally have no load on your web site, and suddenly a specific event (e.g. a football game) causes millions of users to visit your site simultaneously.  Admittedly, this scenario has some exotic performance test requirements, but it is largely irrelevant to us.

The next presentation was “Deploying Image Recognition with TensorFlow and Kubernetes” by C. West from Google.

This was an interesting presentation because of the subject, and because the presenter was quite good at it.  Within half an hour we were taken through a tutorial on setting up a machine learning application using google technologies.

The next presentation was “Containerize everything: Stateful apps on Kubernetes” by Chris Madden.

It was mainly about using Persistent Volumes of Kubernetes to provision storage for persisting the state of (otherwise stateless) scalable web applications.  Fairly narrow scope, fairly convincing.

The next presentation was “Kubernetes in production” by K. Bollen, (who comes from game development so he likes things to run fast,) and it was a description of how they deploy their web app using kubernetes.  A considerable part of the talk had to do with features and peculiarities of the google infrastructure that they use for this.

Mind you, these were just the talks that I attended. There were more, some happening in parallel, and at least one more happening after I left. (By the time 6th talk was over, my brain was fried.)