LISA 2019

Ronaldo Saheki
Nov 3 · 4 min read

I strongly believe that going to a conference is an excellent opportunity for many reasons:

  • Get to know new people from the same area of expertise
  • Learn new topics and trends from the talks
  • To build a community
  • Bring those new learnings into your work and share with coworkers and bring more value to the company

First of all, there are a couple of reasons I was drawn into LISA 2019 conference, first of all, it’s a traditional one, it’s the 33th edition of the conference, and always had good content, like there was a talk back in 2006 talking about Site Reliability at Google, by Tom Limoncelli, more than a decade before the industry would start using the Site Reliability Engineer term, and I’ve been following his blog for quite some time and he always speak well about this conference. Unfortunately I couldn’t find him on this conference or Christine Hogan, so no selfies with Tom or Christine! :(

Usenix Lisa 19 info board

And as I’m a Linux Sysadmin at the core of my heart and former SunOS/Solaris Admin, I’ve been following Brendan Gregg for some years now about DTrace, Performance and in the last couple of years: eBPF.

Have been planning to reserve some time to study and check those tools but failing in the last couple of years, when I checked that there would be a workshop from Brendan Gregg about those tools on this conference, I was already sold and had to find my way from Lisbon, Portugal to go to Portland, OR, USA for this conference!

Brendan Gregg speaking about Linux Systems Performance

So, after his presentation I was struggling to get a selfie with him, because I was the only person in the room who asked for it, it set me so nervous I unfortunately couldn’t do much talking after this.

Photo with Brendan Gregg at LISA 2019

I really need to check and try to remember better the name of all the authors of articles and books I like before going to this conference, because certainly there was a lot of other great people there to listen and learn from!

Other Talks and Workshops that I would highlight would be The Container Operator’s Manual, by Alice Goldfuss; Kubernetes the Very Hard Way, by Laurent Bernaille; and the workshops of the last day: Defender’s Guide to Container Infrastructure Security, by Madhu Akula; Deep Dive into Kubernetes Internals for Builders and Operators, by Jérôme Petazzoni and last but not the least, BPF Performance Tools, by Brendan Gregg. There was several tracks happening at once so those are just my personal opinion on the conference sessions I attended.

The last conference I attended was DockerCon, which is huge and had more than 5000 attendees, and LISA has much less participants, I think just a bit over 500 attendees. So during the 3 days we kind of see the same people and have more and better opportunity to interact with other people attending the conference, and the conference also provide some ribbons to attach to our badge that makes conversations easier, so beside talking with my colleague from OLX Group, I also knew and talked to a few new conference colleagues: Michael and Nancy from Yale University, Tiffany from Zapproved and Filipe Felisbino from Udemy, Ron and a few other people.

A photo with Nancy from Yale and Tiffany from Zapproved, to show to my daughter awesome people I met and rainbow hair!
A photo with Nancy from Yale and Tiffany from Zapproved, to show to my daughter awesome people I met and rainbow hair!
A photo with Nancy from Yale and Tiffany from Zapproved, to show to my daughter awesome people I met and rainbow hair!
Getting to know new friends with a lot in common: Filipe Felisbino from Udemy

I am now back to Lisbon and I learned new things and knew different people and felt more part of the “Sysadmin and Proud” and SRE community.

Now I hope to have opportunity to go to LISA 2020! Some approvals and stuff. It was great and hope to come back again, thanks a lot to Usenix for organising LISA, the community, sponsors and a special one to OLX Group for the opportunity to be at LISA 2019 Conference!

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