SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa

Laura de Vesine, Datadog, Inc.


It's a strong principle of good UX design that users should get feedback about the results of their actions, to help prevent errors. Experienced SREs know to build in additional observability to systems to watch our systems change as we mutate them, but these are typically out-of-band and require a conscious, deliberate action to observe -- so getting good feedback into our actions requires constant vigilance and training of new users. What if we instead built control planes that tell us exactly what we've done, and what effect that is having?
This talk explores various patterns of "fire and forget" control planes in production systems, how each one contributes to outages, and some simple solutions to build better tools for operations.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/de-vesine

Philip Rowlands, Jane Street


This is a talk about calendars, clocks, and computers. We’ll look at the metrology of the second, from candles to atoms, and consider how your phone always seems to know the right time.

If you’ve ever wondered why is today Thursday? or how was the Gregorian calendar adopted? then come and learn the mistakes to avoid the next time you are the Pope.

If you’ve ever wondered why do these two clocks disagree? then come and learn about the challenges of finding the elusive perfect tick, and why it’s not at the top of Mount Everest.

And if you’ve ever wondered how calendars and clocks work together in modern computer systems, then come and learn about protocols and APIs for keeping clocks reliable and accurate.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/rowlands

Diomidis Spinellis, AUEB & TU Delft


Explore the timeless lessons of Unix’s evolution in a talk that examines its significant influence on modern computing. For over fifty years, Unix has been a cornerstone in shaping software technologies and development practices. This session will guide you through a historical narrative, illustrating key innovations from Unix's First Research Edition to modern FreeBSD releases, such as prototyping, portability, modular coding, and the importance of developer efficiency over machine time.

Discover the architectural philosophies embedded in Unix, such aggressive partitioning, composition, layering, and convention-based extensibility, as well as the strategic use of pipelines and filters for program composition. Based on extensive research and case studies, this talk is not just a technical retrospective but also a reminder of the enduring principles that continue to inform effective system and software development today. Perfect for developers, architects, and tech enthusiasts eager to enhance their programming ethos with proven, age-old wisdom.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/spinellis

Adam Tornhill, CodeScene


We'll never be able to understand a software system from a single snapshot of the code. Instead we need to understand how the code evolved and how the people who work on it are organized. We also need strategies for finding bottlenecks and technical debt impairing our productivity, as well as uncovering hidden dependencies between code and people. Where do you find such strategies if not within the field of criminal psychology?


This session starts with a crash course in offender profiling before we quickly move on to adopt those principles to software development. You'll learn how easily obtained version-control data lets you uncover the behavior and patterns of the development organization. This language-neutral approach lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals guided by data. The presentation will change how you view code. Promise.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/tornhill

Thomas Fricke


Let us have look into the resource consumption of data centers and collect the current state of knowledge. There will be more questions than answers but predictions can be made because all resources have their limits.

The increase has already been exponential for years. With the AI hype, the demand for energy, cooling, water and other resources has increased dramatically.

The existing GPU based computing paradigm cuts hard into the standard design of data centers and demands other ways of cooling.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/fricke

Hillel Wayne


What makes software engineering different from “traditional” engineering? To find out, I interviewed 17 “crossovers”: people who have worked professionally as both a software and a traditional engineer. In aggregate, we learn three things: we are in fact engineers, we’re not actually that different as a field, and there’s a lot we can both teach and learn.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/wayne