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Your ten minutes:

Add an aside to the keynote
Turn the retries question into Q: and A:
Define !SLO
Quote one line
Write one task per talk
Take The Docs Nobody Reads out into a file of its own

Boring Software

Priya Raman, keynote

innovation token: one new, unproven thing a team can afford to adopt; spend them where it counts
SLO: service level objective, the reliability you promise yourselves, like 99.9% of requests under 300ms

most outages come from the new thing, not the old thing
each team gets about three innovation tokens
choose boring tech for everything that isn’t your product
she credited Dan McKinley’s Choose Boring Technology

graph of incidents by age of dependency, drops off after year 2

So the first two years of a dependency are where we pay for it. Worth checking against our own incident log.

she kept coming back to SLO

QaudienceWhen is it worth spending a token?
APriyaWhen it’s the thing your customers pay you for.

Boring is a feature you only notice when it’s gone.

Priya Raman

We’ve spent at least five tokens on the build alone.

Count our innovation tokens before the planning meeting on November 3, 2026
Read Choose Boring Technology

Backpressure for the Rest of Us

Tomás Ortega

backpressure: a consumer telling a faster producer to slow down

producer faster than consumer, something has to give
three choices: buffer, drop, or slow the producer down
pick one on purpose

an unbounded queue is choosing to crash later

unbounded queueOur importer does exactly this. That was the outage in August.

QTomásWho has a queue with no max?
AHalf the room.
QaudienceDo retries count?

ATomásRetries are just a producer you forgot about.

That’s the line I’ll remember.

Put a max on the importer’s queue, and decide what happens when it’s full

The Docs Nobody Reads

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