Lightning Talks
Room Qu4a
Wednesday, April 12th 2023
12:45 AM—1:30 PM EST
Wisdom and Trivia: Getting Past Facts to Get to Information
Maurice Gaston, Software Development & Engineering Leader, Comcast
We all carry a lot of information around with us. In the circles many of travel, it’s an occupational hazard. And with that constant exposure to concepts, problems, requirements, and data, it’s easy to assume that the facts we are collecting amount to something significant. Not so fast…
It’s also true, with the way we work today, that information is only valuable when it is accessible and actionable. When we can get at it, share it, examine it, and commoditize it. Facts need to become knowledge. So how does that work? Let’s quickly consider a few simple precepts for avoiding trivia when we mean to get to wisdom.
Getting Creative with HPA Scaling in Kubernetes
Drew Rogers, DevOps Engineer, SRE Consultant, and Sysadmin at Chariot Solutions
Scaling workloads have gotten faster and faster throughout the years, but what about the metrics that drive scaling? From virtual machines to pods in Kubernetes, the rules for scaling haven’t changed all that much. Your app’s CPU/Memory increases, scale up.
What if we had a way to fetch any metrics we want from internal or external sources? What if instead of waiting for increased utilization to scale our app, we can predict it? Using custom and external metrics, we can get creative with the rules that drive horizontal pods scaling in Kubernetes.
The Art of Problem-Solving: Strategies for Finding Your Way in the Dark
Gary Sieling, Principal Engineer, Certara
Software developers are often tasked with well-defined responsibilities. These include implementing small tickets or delivering large-scale features based on detailed specifications. Effective engineers develop many skills to be more effective in a structured environment, such as breaking down large units of work into small ones, coordinating tasks among a team, or hands on tasks like debugging code.
When building an entirely new product, you need to choose where to focus your attention to validate the idea quickly. This talk will discuss how to navigate exploratory projects to transform vague business objectives into the actionable work that software developers are skilled at executing.
A Simple Talent Development Program for a Sustainable Software Engineering Department
Sue Gerace, Engineering Manager, Certara
Does your current employer prefer to hire experienced engineers rather than entry level because of the cost of training? Do the entry level engineers at your workplace thirst for more technical knowledge, and do the senior engineers express a desire to share what they have learned throughout their careers? At Certara, our engineers inspired us to design a simple but effective early career engineering development program. This program not only benefits the entry level folks, but it also enriches the senior employees by utilizing a concept known as the Protégé effect.
This program is centered around food, tech talks, open discussions, mob programming and… fun. This talk will explore what we implemented, what worked, what didn’t work, and new additions suggested by our entry level folks.
Linux is getting Rusty (and so is Android)
Matt Gilbride, Android Platform Security, Google
Until late last year, working on the Linux kernel required writing C. Thanks to the Rust-For-Linux project, that’s not true anymore. There are now several efforts to write kernel drivers in Rust. I’ll talk a bit about the effort to rewrite the Binder driver — one of the most security and performance critical components of Android.
