LISA 2016 - Day 0/1/2

LISA again! This is the fifth? (Washington, Baltimore, San Diego, San Jose, Seattle, and now Boston) sixth! that I've been to. Saturday's flight in was fairly uneventful, except a) it didn't bother my sciatica too much, so yey and b) I forgot my coat on the plane, and it doesn't look like Air Canada has a working system to take "Hey, did you see a coat?" calls.

Fortunately I can count on the kindness of Andy Seely, who brought an extra coat and loaned it to me. For his kindness I have given him a "Taggart Transcontinental" t-shirt, and let him buy me supper. I'm nothing if not generous.

Sunday I spent the entire day at the Google SRE tutorial, which was very, very cool; a big part of it was an exercise to architect a system that would read and join logfiles. It took a long time to wrap my head around how everyone was thinking about this, but writing down the moving parts made it all a lot clearer. In the end, my team's proposal approximated the final example config presented by Google, so that was good. Final sol'n, BTW, used 101 machines. The math all worked out, but it still made my jaw drop. When I asked the presenters about this, they grinned. "We've forgotten how to count small," one of them said.

Today was spent in "Everything you ever wanted to know about operating systems but were afraid to ask", aka "Caskey's Brain Dump". It was a pretty awesome talk, covering everything from silicon through filesystems. Well worth it; I'd love a recording of it, since the slides simply don't do it justice.