TRIP REPORT: QCon SF 2019, Amtrak Coast Starlight, #Bikelife in San Francisco, and Thoughts

This past week has been QCon. I departed last Sunday on the Coast Starlight. My preference is to take the train when it’s possible. Sometimes the schedule allows it, sometimes it doesn’t. This trip, the schedule was perfect for a little coding time on the train, reading, and introspection. Taking the train always gives me a bunch of time to do these things uninterupted while being comfortable and enjoying the countryside rolling by.

The train got out of the station and I cut some video for a VLOG episode or two. To note, I’ve got more than a few, some linked in this post, VLOG’s of the week and the various adventure. I hope they’re interesting and in some cases informational! Feel free to ask questions, I’m more than happy to elaborate on any of the videos, content, and the related topics.

Departing Seattle for San Francisco to attend QCon

The train departs at 9:45am from King Street Station. If I had to drive or take transit I’d have to get up at about 6am to get there and fiddle with luggage and all that, but since I was cycling bikelife style to the station, I got up around 7:15. However, I didn’t follow that schedule a made a coffee stop on the way.

When I arrived at the station I saw one of those post boards that showed the old Union Station near the King Street Station and I point out a few details about the two. I included some tips for bike life traveling via the train too. Rolled on out to the platform and boarded. Watch the video for a shrot summary of my departure and boarding the train.

The countryside is beautiful on this trip, and getting into Oakland and the ferry ride across the bay is spectacular. I had to, of course, VLOG a bit of that too.

After getting in I made my way back down via Valencia onto Market Street to the Hyatt for QCon Day 1 events. A VLOG on that run with a little montage and then some thoughts.

First thoughts, it won’t be soon enough that get get SOV (Single Occupant Vehicles) off of Market Street altogether. The street is used in a vastly superior way having transit, active transport, and work vehicles as is. Having SOV’s plying the streets just makes it dangerous and clogs up the whole thing, but alas, that’s just a first though.

I got into QCon and was super stoked to catch a few talks and talk to fellow data folks. I had noted though, even as a sponsor, our badges don’t get us access to anything really but the sponsorship hallway. That was kind of a bummer, so in the interim I had to work some magic so that I could catch some talks!

Palumi & Langauges of Infrastructure by Joe Duffy was the first talk I wanted to see. Alas, with scheduling I couldn’t make it. The description read,

“We have all become cloud developers. Every day we use the cloud to supercharge our applications, deliver new capabilities, and reach scales previously unheard of. Leveraging the cloud effectively, however, means navigating and mastering the ever-expanding infrastructure landscape, including public cloud services for compute, data, and AI; containers, serverless, and Kubernetes; hybrid environments; and even SaaS — often many at once.

Join us to learn about the modern languages, tools, and techniques that leading-edge companies are using to innovate in this world of ever-increasing cloud capabilities. We will explore: how to create, deploy, and manage cloud applications and infrastructures; approaches for cloud architectures and continuous delivery; and how modularity and reuse is being applied to infrastructure to tame the complexity, boost productivity, and ensure secure best practices.”

Hopefully we can get Joe to come speak at Seattle Scalability in the coming year! I’d even like to setup a hack day akin to a workshop to try out some of these techniques and related languages for infrastructure for the meet! Ping me Joe and we’ll make it happen!

The next talk I really wanted to catch too was Lachlan‘s “Helm 3: A Mariner’s Delight”.

“Adjusting your spyglass and looking out over the water, you can see how useful a package manager like Helm is. Perhaps you’ve used it to manage the fractal complexity of packages on your Kubernetes clusters (without losing track of versions stashed in the hold). But Helm 3 is rumored to be different, and you’re ready to get started on this exciting voyage – as soon as you have some idea of what’s port and what’s starboard!

In this story-fueled session, we’ll take you through differences from the Helm of yore, tips for a successful rollout or upgrade, and opportunities to shape the project’s future. The cloud native waters can be choppy, but a technical deep dive powered by open source tooling will steer you right!”

But again, my scheduling and access prevented this but I’m hopeful. This next week is KubeCon and I should be able to catch up with a number of people, maybe even Lachlan, on the Helm 3 bits!

Other talks that I might have or might not have officially attended included “Beyond Microservices: Streams, State and Scalability”, “Better Living through Software at The Human Utility”, and “Parsing JSON Really Quickly: Lessons Learned”. I hear they were all spectacular talks! 😉

Day 2 rolled in. Talked with Auth0 and Solace at their respective booths, if you’re curious.

After all that, another solid QCon, I’ll make sure to get a full pass next time if I can make it. Unless of course they fix that ranked access sponsorship pass mess, then I’d happily opt for that again. It is after all rather interesting to speak with all the companies.

After the conference I put together an exit VLOG. Enoy! Catch everybody next time!

Next week, on to KubeCon, cuz two conferences in two weeks is like a two-fer!

 

Coder’s Vacation : #RICON2012 Photos So Far…

All of these images can be viewed here: http://adronhall.smugmug.com/Software/Meetups-N-Conferences/RICON-2012

San Franciscans heading to work, to RICON and wherever they want to.
San Franciscans heading to work, to RICON and wherever they want to.
RICON 2012 SWAG.
RICON 2012 SWAG.
Main Room Filling Up...
Main Room Filling Up…
...and filling up some more.
…and filling up some more.
Basho Crew taking care of conf biz...
Basho Crew taking care of conf biz…
...handling the room.
…handling the room.

The Basho team including Tom Santero @tsantero, Shanley Kane @shanley, and others rocked putting things together and getting everything to us attendees and making sure we headed off like herded cats in appropriate paths to the sessions. Great job! You guys rocked it!

Mark kicking things off...
Mark kicking things off…

All of this hard work setup for a great conference experience with content and more (see my previous blog entry for more). But I digress, on to more pictures. To the right Mark Phillips @pharkmillups kicking off the conference. Below is Don Rippert @djrippert giving an intro, where he pointed out a very important notion, “…this big movement isn’t about cloud or nosql, the movement is about distributed systems…”.

Dan Rippert Basho CEO
Dan Rippert @djrippert Basho CEO
Talking ACID. Absolutely great talk by Joseph Hellerstein, Professor, UC Berkeley
Talking ACID. Absolutely great talk by Joseph Hellerstein @joe_hellerstein, Professor, UC Berkeley
Portland Representing, Selena Marie Handling the Postgresql Preso
Portland Representing, Selena Marie @selenamarie Handling the Postgresql Preso
Amber handling the logistics, thanks for finding my hoodie when it disappeared!
Amber @amberishikawa, thx for finding my hoodie when it disappeared!
Portland Basho Office Representing, Eric Redmond, database guy @coderoshi
Portland Basho Office Representing, Eric Redmond, database guy @coderoshi
George Reese @georegereese & James Urquhart @jamesurquhart
George Reese @georegereese & James Urquhart @jamesurquhart

George & James, when not at baseball games or thrashing some guitar do some distributed computing system things over at Enstratus. Both of these guys write some seriously solid material, so hit the google and do a search on these guys, then read their books & articles. Cheers guys, good to catch up!

Coder’s Vacation : Preparation “RICON 2012, HTML 5 Developers Conference and Loading Up”

This next week I’m off to San Francisco for a coder’s vacation. I don’t exactly know what a coder’s vacation is but that’s what I’m aiming to define! I’ll put together a description of my idea of a coder’s vacation below. There are going to be several components about this vacation that really make it a coder’s vacation, such as:

  1. My trip is to San Francisco – This makes it an ideal place to be, as a coder, to hone one’s skills and meet the top people in startups, software and other areas. There is literally coding happening all over the city. Plus it is a fairly nice city to frequent to begin with.
  2. I’m Traveling via the Coast Starlight – This will give me significant time to study up on some of the things I’m learning right now. A little node.js, javascript, go and maybe even some other things while I relax in luxury and enjoy first class accommodations in the sleeper. I’ll also be blogging a bit about this and what it is like to disconnect for a while when you’re in transit between two points. There is some serious time to get out of the rat race and figure out we’re your headed personally, with technology, coding and more (and yes, that is one of my pictures of the Coast Starlight from a few years ago, it is a beast of a train at 15 cars!).
  3. I’ll be attending RICON 2012 – If you’re going to be there, let me know. We should meetup during the conference. Maybe pair up on some code, discuss data architectures, dilemmas and related things or just grab a drink. Since the trip is coinciding with the conference, there was no way I wasn’t going to go hang out with the Basho Crew and their inaugeral conference on #phatdata (see twitter for more context).
  4. I’ll be speaking at HTML 5 Developer’s Conference – This isn’t during the “vacation” part of the trip, but it is in San Francisco.
  5. Pairing up, conversations & coding with others – Because San Francisco is one of the best places in the world for this. I’ll be meeting up with some other coders and working on some ideas around #phatdata, architecture with various frameworks and solutions like Node.js, JavaScript and prospectively some others.
  6. I’ll be tweeting, documenting, blogging, video recording and photographing – Nuff’ said.  🙂

Definition:

Coder’s Vacation – [kohd]-er’s [vey-keyshuhn, vuh-] – A form of vacation, except that the individual taking the vacation is a coder and participates in coder activities. Such as hackathons, pair coding, maker development, physical computing, learning or reading about new software development technologies or otherwise spends their time on the vacation.

Phat Data (see also #phatdata) – [fat] [dey-tuh, dat-uh, dah-tuh] – I’ve replaced the use of the big data term with that of phat data. It just seems more fun, just as poor a characterization of the topic, so why not. If you can define big data then you can define phat data! So basically, help me define this, I’ll be tweeting about it a lot at RICON 2012.

For more definitions of things I often use in phrases on the blog, check out my dictionary. With this laid out, let the coder vacation begin.

Cheers!