MeetUps are the cornerstone of any great community. Whether monthly, weekly, or semi-annually, people come together under a common umbrella to learn, discuss, socialize, and share. Most meetups focus on the good bits, the best case scenario, or talk about practice in a vacuum. Here at Humio, we decided to go for something a bit different.
For a few months now, we’ve started a MeetUp focused on the everyday, real-world things we experience. Systems We Run is a monthly MeetUp in San Francisco committed to discussing the things we do and what happens when our systems stop functioning like an utopia and start getting real.
We kicked off this series with Randy Shoup, VP of Engineering at WeWork, addressing architectures at scale.
YouTube: Randy Shoup — Service Architectures at Scale
As you can see from Randy’s talk, the idea is we work towards resilience and attempt to have things run smoothly. But is some ways, that never happens! Every system working in the real world is prone to failures. While we engineer our systems to be as sturdy as possible, we should also focus on what happens when things go sideways.
When the CTO of Joyent, Bryan Cantrill, came to speak, he focused on his summer with RUST; a language with pitfalls, problems, and some great solutions when you’re looking in the right place.
YouTube: Bryan Cantrill — The Summer of RUST
While we love hearing about the perfect system, the perfect infrastructure setup, the perfect dev environment, folks are rarely open enough to say what happens when things fall apart. And it happens to everyone, from AWS US East region outages to someone’s single page web application falling over because of a missed JavaScript library. Some of the causes are simple, easy to track down. Others can be massive and require a thorough follow up to see what’s wrong or what went wrong.
With these MeetUps, we plan to bring you those stories. Find out what went wrong, how to take preventative measures, and build the best experience you can with the tools you have.
Up next is Ryan Neal, Head of Infrastructure and part of the founding team at Netlify. Ryan has worked on the infrastructure team at Yelp and in the defense sector at Palantir in the Middle East. Come hear the story of his multi-cloud migration; the challenges, planning, testing, and execution (gory details included). There will be key take-aways to apply to your own infrastructure decisions. Registration opens soon.
Keep an eye out for rolling announcements on the next meetups and speakers. And reach out if you have a story you’d like to share!
