Skip to main content

React conference in San Francisco 2014

Last week I attended the React conference in San Francisco. The conference is a two day event where speakers share their experiences on building reactive systems: ones that are resilient, elastic, responsive, and message driven. The reactive manifesto web page  has more detailed information about reactive systems, and why they are useful.

This year the conference was at Cobb's Comedy Club, a cozy venue for the roughly 300 people that attended the conference. Because of the tight space, power plugs were non existent, but the organizers were extremely thoughtful and provided every attendee with a rechargeable battery with iPhone and Android connectors.

The sessions in the conference were great, but a couple stood out. The first was Netflix's presentation "Resilient by Design", where the speaker talked about how Netflix designs and deploys their services: from using microservices that do one thing and do it very well with well defined interfaces, to cloud services everywhere, and thinking about failures and how to degrade gracefully when they happen. The speaker gave an example of the Netflix homepage, where every component from the movie recommendations, to the most popular movies, to the video bookmarking functionality is a service, and that when one of them fails, there is always a meaningful fallback that still allows the user to have a decent experience.

The second was the talk by Gil Tene from Azule systems about "Understanding Latency." The speaker gave great examples of how myopic statistics are deceiving, and how timing measurements in general suffer from mistakes of omission, especially when one request stalls and takes a long time to finish.

The third was the talk by Leslie Lamport about how to specify systems formally through TLA+. The talk was both entertaining and informational at the same time. Lamport admitted that engineers and their managers are allergic to formal specifications, and that they don't see value in them. He then gave a taste of what formal systems are, what they can help with, and  proceeded with counter examples to debunk the myth that formal specs are not useful. Some of the counter examples were discovering design problems that would have been very costly to fix in  Chord, dynamoDB and other Amazon web services, cache coherence in the alpha chip, and the XBox 360 memory model.

Hopefully the conference talks will be online on youtube for others to enjoy the talks as much as the conference attendees did.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running

I wanted to experiment with TensorFlow, and decided to do that in a Linux VM, despite the fact that Windows Subsystem for Linux exists. In the past I used Sun’s, and then Oracle’s VirtualBox to manage virtual machines, but since my Windows install had Hyper-V, I decided to use that instead. The virtual machine configuration was easy, with disk, networking, and memory configurations non-eventful. However when I tried to start the virtual machine to setup Ubuntu from an ISO, I was greeted with the following error: “Virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running” A quick Internet search revealed that a lot of people have faced that problem, and most of the community board solutions did not make any sense. The hidden gem is this technet article , which included detailed steps to find if the Windows Hypervisor was running or not, and the error message if it failed to launch. In my case, the error was: “Hyper-V launch failed; Either VMX not present or

Why good customer service matters?

I am not an Apple fan, but I do like their computers, and recommend them to colleagues and friends for a variety of reasons. They are well designed, and in addition to an excellent user interface, they run a flavor of Unix--which makes the life of computer programmers a lot easier. But most importantly, Apple's customer support is impeccable, that despite all the hardware issues I experienced in the past, I still recommend Apple computers. Let me explain why. A year and a half ago, I bought a Mac Book Pro for work. At the time it was the first generation unibody laptop, that had an i7 processor, lots of memory, and lots of disk space. Alas, like first generation models everywhere, it also had a lot of hardware problems. The most annoying of which was the screen randomly turning dark, with the hard drive spinning out of control. The only way to get out of this state was by forcing a reboot by holding down the power button, and losing everything I have been working on. At first

MacOS Catalina, OneDrive, and case sensitive file systems

Over the weekend, I dusted off my old Macbook Air to search for some old family photos. I have not used the laptop for a long time, and it was completely out of charge. I plugged it in, and it quickly booted. Shortly after, I got bombarded with notifications that many of the applications needed updating, and that a new version of the OS was available.   I waited till I found the photos I was looking for, before attempting to upgrade anything. I also wanted to install OneDrive to get my old files to the cloud, so that I can access them from any of my devices, instead of dusting off old computers to get to them. The MacOS upgrade experience has always been fantastic, and this one was no different. The OS upgrade files downloaded quickly and after a restart and a quick install, the Macbook Air was ready to go.   Upgrading the installed applications was also a breeze, however in the process I discovered that a large majority of the applications installed were not compatible with Cata