Between November 5-7 I spent three days on the O’Reilly Velocity conference. This post documents the sessions I liked the most.

The conference organizers collected the speaker slides here

Tuesday

I travelled to Berlin on Monday and started the conference with two, half-day tutorials.

Open Telemetry workshop

In this workshop, tutored by Liz Fong-Jones, I learned about OpenTelemetry: a project aiming to standardize metrics and trace collections from applications.

Our task was to instrument the provided Go code. This was an HTTP service computing the Fibonacci sequence using its recursive definition. To compute the preceding two numbers in the sequence the server code repeatedly issues HTTP client calls to itself. This implementation is terrible for production, but it is an excellent classroom example.

For the practical exercises we wrote the code on Glitch. I think this was a great choice, I could immediately start working on the execrcises without installing anything on my computer.

SRE classroom (PubSub)

In this workshop Google engineers lead us to design a strongly consistent, multi-datacenter queue. The instructors described how the system should behave, what latencies are tolerated, what failures modes are allowed. We formed groups of five-six people to come-up with an implementation plan. Then, we created a bill of materials to estimate the cost of building the system.