Abstract:

At the heart of all processes in the world is a basic causality that we capture through rules and laws, in physics, biology, chemistry--in all the sciences. It's common to imagine that the virtual world of simulating processes on computers belongs to a different world altogether, but research into computer networks over the past 30 years reveals that we've been looking too narrowly at these different realms. Physics and network computing have a lot in common, and it's not just for quantum computers--the Internet itself behaves very much like quantum mechanics when we look at it in a certain way and on a certain scale. Mark Burgess has pioneered this research and has explained it in several books. His keynote is part computing, part physics, he'll talk about what this all means for the future of computing, and how this helps us to understand problems from cloud to machine learning.

Bio:

Physicist, technologist, advisor to public and private organizations globally---author, founder and original architect of CFEngine, founder of ChiTek-i, and Aljabr. International technology advisor, and public speaker. Contributor to the science and technology of distributed computer systems in today's Internet Infrastructure, especially through semantics of Configuration and Promise Theory. Popularizer of science, and advocate for science's cultural importance in modern education, as well as part time composer.

Previously Professor of Networks and Systems at Oslo (Metropolitan) University, teaching in Physics, Mathematics, Operating Systems, Network and System Administration, Networking Technologies, laboratory skills, Programming Languages, Computer Security and many seminar series on scientific methods for PhD students. I abandoned this position to work in the field. I assist in the editing of a number of scientific journals.

Ellen is Founder in Residence at boldstart Ventures. She joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – some investing and hands-on support for founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies.

Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked at Blade as an EIR, seeding the work for what became Lola. She also worked on backer-facing projects at Kickstarter and on the first versions of Office for non-Microsoft phone platforms. The common thread is building tools that help people to do creative work.

Ellen has an a M.B.A from Harvard Business School, and a B.S in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. She grew up in Rochester Hills, MI, but now lives in Somerville, MA with her husband and her cat, Gutenberg.

Do you know what it feels like to navigate as someone who can’t distinguish between green and red - looking at those badges that tell you whether something is broken or a-okay? I’ll give you a quick look into what it feels like with some examples from the monitoring tool Icinga Web 2.

We all tend to forget, that not everyone sees the world like we do. In this talk I’ll be walking you through different views in Icinga Web 2 with side-by-side comparisons for the default views and how different kinds of vision impairments affect those. The talks also features a few suggestions on how to improve colour schemes and making websites and webapps better to navigate with screen readers!

In this bleak, depressing talk we will discuss some of the ways computer science and computer security has fallen flat on its face, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes, with just a soupçon of humor for good measure.

We will break these problems down and hopefully learn some important lessons, such as not allowing your door locks to call system(), how to properly secure your corner of the Internet Of Things, a crash course in processor architectures and how they lie to you, and how the inevitable heat-death of the universe is a result of RSA.

Hopefully, you’ll emerge feeling smarter, discussing new topics, and slightly terrified.

DEVOPS TALK: One-size doesn't fit all - Effectively (re)evaluate a data solution for your system

When it comes to data solutions, one-size doesn’t fit all. Choosing the right best-matching database, or data tools, can be a game changer for your system. How can you take such decision effectively? The system, the company, the product, and probably your team - all are evolving, and the best solution for today may not fit tomorrow’s needs. In order to pick a data solution for longer term, you should evaluate the optional data tools according to several factors. These factors will reflect the requirements looking forward.

At this session, we will share such use case, of evaluating data solution, when we redesigned one of Oribi features from scratch. Our goal was to avoid a data explosion crisis, while the system kept scaling up. Having so many solutions out there - we needed to make sure that we are choosing the one that will support the increasing load farthest.

Eventually we picked up ten criteria factors, which we used to compare and choose the best solution effectively. Join the session to hear what were these factors, and get prepared for choosing the next data solution for your system.

BIO: Eynav is a fan of the combination of technology and people - bringing technical visions into implementation. For the past 2 years she has been leading the R&D group at Oribi, a big-data based product, that handles billions of events a day, while scaling both the system and the engineering group. Her main focus is to create processes that support high scale & high standards; striving to maintain scalable R&D groups and infrastructure environments, while investing in personal growth and deployments quality.

STATSCRAFT TALK: PRINCIPLES OF OBSERVABILITY

The word observable entered the English language roughly 400 years ago, but the concepts of what it means to see, comprehend, and understand something have been debated since time immemorial. Starting in the 19th century, a series of postulates and criteria coalesced into control theory, and it is from this body of knowledge that we gained the word “observability”. Today, with the advent of complex, interconnected computer systems, that word has taken on new meanings and connotations—some useful, some detrimental, and some just plain confusing.

In this talk, we’ll mix a little history, a touch of philosophy, and a healthy dose of reality, to demystify what observability means to us as professional computer people. We’ll tear through the marketing material and unearth foundational principles that will help us to build better infrastructure, write better software, and promote healthier business practices. Finally, we’ll explore some potential new avenues for discussion and understanding.