schedule.html

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title: Schedule
meta-description: The programme for the Scaleconf, a conference focusing on web scalability
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    <h1>Schedule</h1>
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        <p>This is the planned schedule, which should not be subject to too much change, barring last-minute emergencies.</p>
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        <p>
        The schedule is available as a Google Calendar in the following formats:
        <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/scaleconf.org_gmtdlc49hlqp7v1cgc54tnl59c%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic">
            <img src="https://www.google.com/calendar/images/xml.gif" alt="XML" title="XML" />
        </a>
        <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/scaleconf.org_gmtdlc49hlqp7v1cgc54tnl59c%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics">
            <img src="https://www.google.com/calendar/images/ical.gif" alt="iCAL" title="iCAL" />
        </a>
        <a href="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=scaleconf.org_gmtdlc49hlqp7v1cgc54tnl59c%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=Africa/Johannesburg">
            <img src="https://www.google.com/calendar/images/html.gif" alt="HTML" title="HTML" />
        </a>
        </p>
        <p>
        In addition, the entire schedule is available as a <a href="http://guidebook.com/getit/">Guidebook</a> guide which you can easily load on your phone.
        </p>
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    <div class="span8"><h1>Wednesday evening, January 25th</h1></div>
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    <div class="span3"><b>7:00 PM - 11:00 PM</b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Pre-conference drinks</div>
    <div class="span9">
        We will be at <a href="http://www.wakame.co.za/">Wakame</a> in Seapoint on the evening before the conference to meet up and have a few drinks.
        This will be a chance to socialize and network with the speakers, organizers, and fellow conference attendees.  There wil be a limited bar-tab.
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        <h1>Thursday, January 26th</h1>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 8:30 AM - 9:30 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Registration</div>
    <div class="span9">
        This will include tea/coffee served with home-made banana bread and cheese and ham croissants.
    </div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 9:30 AM - 10:15 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Jonathan Hitchcock</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Clearly I Have Made Some Bad Decisions</b>
        <p>
        Too often in the organization of this conference we have heard "but I don't have scalability issues".
        </p>
        <p>
        This talk discusses what scalability issues actually are, and details why we all inevitably have them.  Avoiding them, or delaying solutions until they are unavoidable, leads to making many bad "temporary" decisions that cannot be fixed further down the line.
        </p>
        <p>
        I will discuss the methodologies and best practices that are required in order to be scalable, and describe the common mistakes they will temper, and why they should be implemented immediately.
        Finally, I will briefly touch on how to deal with rectifying the bad decisions that we all inevitably make, no matter how forward-thinking we are.
        </p>
    </div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 10:15 AM - 10:25 AM</b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Changeover and pee break</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 10:25 AM - 11:10 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Craig Raw</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Webscaling Tips</b>
        <p>
        A collection of some of my learnings from a decade of building and hosting websites and web applications for one of Africa's largest digital agencies. It will cover areas such as languages, persistence, infrastructure architecture and scaling your team. 
        </p>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 11:10 AM - 11:40 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Mid-morning tea/coffee with scones and biscuits</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 11:40 AM - 12:25 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Zach Holman</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Scaling GitHub</b>
        <p>
        A month after launching, GitHub hosted one thousand repositories. Three years later, we host over three million. In the same time we've gone from one thousand users to over a million.
        </p>
        <p>
        This type of scaling presents some interesting technical challenges. I'll dig into our development workflow and how we address concepts like scaling, deployment, code review, and testing.
        </p>
        <p>
        It also presents some interesting business challenges, too. How you grow your company from three employees, how you work in teams, and how you split your app up into services all help ensure that you'll be able to react to your product's growth.
        </p>
    </div>
</div>

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    <div class="span3"><b> 12:25 PM - 12:30 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Five minutes of zen</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Lunch</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Miles Ward</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Scaling using Amazon Web Services</b>
    </div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Afternoon tea/coffee with biscuits</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 3:00 PM - 3:45 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Bryn Divey</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Nimbula's bIC: lessons learned and challenges faced</b>
        <p>bIC is Nimbula's resilient distributed init system that reacts to scale.  This talk will cover the evolution of the tool, the problems it had to overcome, and the lessons learned from developing it.</p>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 3:45 PM - 4:00 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Changeover and pee break</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 4:00 PM - 4:45 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Deon Erasmus</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Highly available infrastructure on the cheap</b>
        <p>Sometimes, hosting your new web or mobile app in the cloud may not be an option, and you'll be faced with the challenge of building your own infrastructure and hosting it somewhere. Being a startup, chances are you are short on cash, already wearing several hats, and inexperienced with the hard stuff. How do you go about designing, sizing, specifying, procuring, implementing, deploying and monitoring the infrastructure for your new app, with a limited budget, and without compromising its ability to scale when your new service takes off? Practical advice, proven configurations and common pitfalls are covered in this talk.</p>
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    <div class="span3"><b> Thursday evening </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Party sponsored by GitHub</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <p>There will be a party at the Foresters Arms, on Newlands Avenue, just down the road from the conference venue, sponsored by GitHub.  There will be a bar tab, and snacks and pizza provided.</p>
        <p>Attendees are more than welcome to spend some time before the party wandering through the beautiful Kirstenbosch gardens - the sun will set around 8pm, although the party will get underway a while before that.</p>
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        <br/>
        <h1>Friday, January 27th</h1>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 8:30 AM - 9:00 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Arrival</div>
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        Tea/coffee served with home-made banana bread and cheese and ham croissants.
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    <div class="span3"><b> 9:00 AM - 9:45 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Ashley Peter</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Scaling a mobile social network</b>
        <p>
        2go has developed a hugely successful mobile social network around its 2go Messenger; a network that has grown to 15 million users across Africa in just a few years. If rapid infrastructure scaling doesn't present enough challenges, doing so in an emerging market only makes it more interesting. Ashley will share techniques used and lessons learned during 2go's growth and what is planned for the future.
        </p>
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<div class="row">  
    <div class="span3"><b> 9:45 AM - 9:55 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Changeover and pee break</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 9:55 AM - 10:40 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Simon de Haan</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Learning to Fail</b>
        <p>
            Building applications for scale in emerging markets such as Africa, while terribly exciting, can be an incredibly uncomfortable exercise. Not only from a perspective of the technical challenges but just as much from a team perspective. One of the keys to staying sane is admitting that we all write terrible code, dreadfully hacky workarounds and resort to incredibly poor solutions all the time. I'll be talking about our experience in failure at Praekelt and how that adds value to what we do and the impact we aim to have.
        </p>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 10:40 AM - 11:10 AM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Mid-morning tea/coffee with scones and biscuits</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 11:10 AM - 11:55 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Coda Hale</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>The programming ape</b>
        <p>
        Humans, you may have noticed, are not exactly rational. And yet here we are, trying to get them to build software. It's a bit of a mess. But there is some good news: by drawing on modern theories of human cognition we can begin to optimize our tools for how people think, not how computers work. I'll talk about our experience at Yammer building human-centric tools for engineers, lay out the sociotechnical challenges facing organizations trying to build transparent architectures, and mention in passing how all of this relates to making money.
        </p>
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<div class="row">  
    <div class="span3"><b> 11:55 AM - 12:00 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Five minutes of zen</div>
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<div class="row">  
    <div class="span3"><b> 12:00 PM - 1:45 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Lunch</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 1:45 PM - 2:30 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Andy Gross</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Riak - the distributed database</b>
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<div class="row">  
    <div class="span3"><b> 2:30 PM - 3:00 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Afternoon tea/coffee with biscuits</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 3:00 PM - 3:45 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Wesley Lynch</div>
    <div class="span9">
        <b>Software Architecture and building E-Commerce Websites</b>
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<div class="row">  
    <div class="span3"><b> 3:45 PM - 4:15 PM </b></div>
    <div class="span3 hl">Closing Comments</div>
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    <div class="span3"><b> 7:00 PM onwards </b></div>
    <div class="span3">Dinner with speakers and other attendees</div>
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        <p>
        We will book a number of restaurants for attendees and speakers, and you can pick one if you would like to attend.  This dinner is not included in the cost of the ticket.  More details on this later.
        </p>
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