OSCON, July 16-20, Portland OR
Dave Pacheco: Node.js in Production: Postmortem Debugging and Performance Analysis
Also visit John Sonnenschein and others of the illumos community at the illumos booth in the expo!
FISL, July 25-28, Porto Alegre, Brazil
Bryan Cantrill: Corporate Open Source Anti-patterns
While open source has long since become commercially mainstream to use and deploy, corporations — especially traditional software concerns — have been slower to open source the software that they themselves have developed. In the past few years, however, this too has shifted: companies have been much more willing to open source their own creations — and many of the most important current open source projects have been initiated or helped immeasurably by commercial concerns. This does not mean, however, that the route is easy or without peril: there remain many traps for corporations as they open source their work, and many possible missteps and opportunities for bad behavior. In this talk, we will discuss our experiences open sourcing software from within commercial concerns, focussing in particular on the mistakes that we have seen made, and how they have shaped our thinking. Further, we will discuss how open source relates to the business of creating, selling and supporting software — and the pitfalls that should be avoided in making the business case for open sourcing.
Brendan Gregg: Performance Analysis: The USE Method
The USE Method is a simple strategy for performing a complete a check of system performance health, identifying common bottlenecks and errors, and checking areas that are often overlooked. This talk introduces the USE Method and shows how it can be applied to Solaris- and Linux-based operating systems.
Deirdré Straughan: Technical Video – Tips and Techniques
Video is rapidly becoming a preferred method of sharing information about technology, from 2-minute tutorials to 1-hour conference talks and 3-hour deep dives. Video production and distribution have become so easy that we can now concentrate on developing new techniques for producing memorable technical content for wider audiences. This talk will give concrete advice and show examples of what to do – and what not to. Learn tips and tricks from a veteran who has created, shared, and live-streamed hundreds of videos of technology experts from conferences, in classrooms, and in boardrooms.
Surge, Sept 27-28, Baltimore MD
Bryan and Brendan will speak on The real-time web in the real world: DIRT in production:
At the Surge 2010 keynote, we described an emerging breed of web-facing applications that exhibited data-intensive real-time semantics (semantics we dubbed “DIRT”). Now, two years later, the first generation of these DIRTy applications have been deployed into wide-scale production, and we have experienced first-hand the new challenge that they present: the explosiveness of demand of the social web but with the constraints of a real-time system–and all via brittle, failure-prone mobile networks. In this talk, we will describe our experiences as the server-side infrastructure provider for one such application, Voxer–a popular push-to-talk mobile app. We will describe how we debugged latency-inducing issues at all layers of the stack: from the bowels of the operating system (I/O, networking, CPU scheduling) through platform (node.js, Erlang/Riak) and into the application. We will describe some of the new challenges that are posed by asynchronous, event-oriented systems like node.js–especially when deployed on mobile applications. Finally, we will describe some of the debugging and visualization technology that we have developed to help us better understand and diagnose these systems–and demonstrate their efficacy on actual production problems.