← How to Take Notes Like a Boss

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

• most outages come from the new thing, not the old thing
• innovation tokens, each team gets about three
• choose boring tech for everything that isn’t your product
• credited Dan McKinley, Choose Boring Technology
• graph of incidents by age of dependency, drops off after year 2
• SLO?
• audience asked when to spend a token, she said when it’s the thing customers pay for
• “Boring is a feature you only notice when it’s gone.”

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Backpressure for the Rest of Us

Tomás Ortega

• 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
• our importer does exactly this
• he asked who has a queue with no max, half the room
• someone asked if retries count, he said retries are just a producer you forgot about

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The Docs Nobody Reads

Dana Whitfield

• write for the person reading at 2am
• one task per page
• examples first, explanation after
• “If the example is wrong, the docs are wrong.”
• test the examples in CI
• she reads the support tickets every Friday to find what to write next
• our README starts with history