Silicon Valley
Past Presentations
Connecting, Managing, Observing, and Securing Services
So our high-level agenda: What is the problem? What's the shape of the solution? What are some service meshes that are around that you could use today and then we'll talk a little bit about maybe when one might be more appropriate than another. And then we'll do the deep dive into Istio itself...
Yes, I Test In Production (And So Do You)
Testing in production has gotten a bad rap. People seem to assume that you can only test before production *or* in production. But while you can rule some things out before shipping, those are typically the easy things, the known unknowns. For any real unknown-unknown,...
Patterns of Streaming Applications
Stream processing engines are becoming pivotal in analyzing data. They have evolved beyond a data transport and simple processing machinery, to one that's capable of complex processing. The necessary features and building blocks of these engines are well known. And most capable engines have a...
Human-Centric Machine Learning Infrastructure @Netflix
Netflix has over 100 data scientists applying machine learning to a wide range of business problems from title popularity predictions to quality of streaming optimizations. Our unique culture gives data scientists plenty of freedom to choose the modeling approach, libraries, and even the...
Artwork Personalization @Netflix
For many years, the main goal of the Netflix personalized recommendation system has been to get the right titles in front each of our members at the right time. With a catalog spanning thousands of titles and a diverse member base spanning over a hundred million accounts, recommending the titles...
Machine Learning for Handwriting and Sketch Recognition
The terms “big data”, “machine learning”, “neural networks”, and “deep learning” have appeared in many attention-grabbing headlines over the years, but what do they really mean? This presentation will describe some concrete examples of how they have impacted a variety of products,...
Interviews
Yes, I Test In Production (And So Do You)
What's the motivation for this talk?
The motivation for this talk is to help people understand that deploying software carries an irreducible element of uncertainty and risk. Trying too hard to prevent failures will actually make your systems and your teams *more* vulnerable to failure and prolonged downtime. So what can you do about it?
Read Full InterviewHuman-Centric Machine Learning Infrastructure @Netflix
Can you give an example of some of the questions you get from data scientists when you are trying to deploy models?
When it comes to common questions, as boring as it may sound, my experience is that machine learning infrastructure is much more about data than science. Most questions we get are related to data: how do I find the data I need, how do I set up the data pipeline, how do I handle the somewhat non-trivial amounts of data in python and R,...
Read Full InterviewArtwork Personalization @Netflix
What work do you do at Netflix?
I lead one of the Machine Learning and Recommendation teams at Netflix. We're responsible for the end-to-end machine learning that decides what shows up on the Netflix homepage across all our different experiences. When you log into Netflix, my team is responsible for what rows of TV shows and movies you see on the homepage. We select...
Read Full InterviewBuilding Resilience in Production Migrations
What's the focus of the work that you do today?
I lead Billing Infrastructure Engineering at Netflix. We build the infrastructure that helps Netflix collect charges from its members. Part of that is to determine who should be charged and how much through our systems. We also hold all the gift codes and balances and track them. We also support major customer workflows. Our services...
Read Full InterviewCapacity Planning for Crypto Mania
What's the focus of the work that you do today?
Jordan: We’re on the Reliability Team at Coinbase. It was formed in response to the crazy spike of scaling challenges around 2017 with Cryptocurrency. The work is focused on traditional SRE topics of monitoring and instrumentation. We act as consultants for other mostly feature-focused teams. For example, we embed in teams to make...
Read Full Interviewnpm and the Future of JavaScript
Can you tell me more about what your talk is about?
I'll talk more about server-side stuff, and I’ll emphasize Node. We've found that the security message is important to people, so there will be quite a bit there. There's been this huge shift in how JavaScript is used and enterprises are only just beginning to catch up to that. There are many people working on JavaScript, and they're...
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