_config.yml

markdown: rdiscount
pygments: true
navigation:
- text: Speakers
  url: /speakers
- text: Schedule
  url: /schedule
- text: Workshops
  url: /workshops
- text: Venue
  url: /venue
- text: Sponsors
  url: /sponsors
- text: Contact
  url: /contact
2012navigation:
- text:
  url: /2012/
- url: /2012/details
  text: Details
- url: /2012/speakers
  text: Speakers
- url: /2012/schedule
  text: Schedule
- url: /2012/sponsors
  text: Sponsors
- url: /2012/location
  text: Location
- url: /2012/feedback-form
  text: Feedback
speakers:
  beat_schwegler:
    name: Beat Schwegler
    company: Microsoft
    role: Director, Platform Strategy Group
    country: Switzerland
    twitter: cloudbeatsch
    bio: >
        is part of Microsoft’s Platform Strategy Group which is developing the
        strategies relating to platform services and service-based applications. He
        started to focus on cloud computing in 2008 and just loves the
        opportunities it provides to businesses of all sizes. In his 10 years at
        Microsoft, Beat has been responsible for cloud platform adoption among
        developers in Western Europe and provided advice on software strategy and
        architecture across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Before joining
        Microsoft, he was an independent architect and developer and was involved
        in a wide variety of projects, ranging from real-time building control
        systems, best-selling shrink-wrapped products to large-scale CRM and ERP
        systems.
    title: Scaling on Windows Azure
    abstract: >
        Coming soon

  dale_humby:
    name: Dale Humby
    company: Nomanini
    role: CTO
    country: SA
    twitter: dalehumby
    bio: coming soon
    title: How Nomanini enables entrepreneurs in South Africa
    abstract: Coming soon

  daniel_fiske:
    name: Daniel Fiske
    company: RightShift
    role: CTO and Founder
    country: SA
    quote: Massively scalable systems for the gaming and gambling sectors
    twitter:
    bio: >
        has spent more than 15 years designing and building massively
        scalable systems for the gaming and gambling sectors. He began in 1997 as a
        software developer for one of the world’s first online casino groups, and
        in 2005 co-founded RightShift as a multiplayer FPS tournament business that
        later pivoted into social gaming in 2008 and (several apps later) launched
        Clickfun Casino in 2011.</p>
        <p>Bootstrapped entirely by the founders without any external funding, Daniel
        and his team have built out proprietary infrastructure capable of
        supporting millions of users. This experience together with his background
        in real money gaming gives Daniel a unique understanding of the overall
        gaming market and a perspective on the rapid convergence of social and real
        money gaming that few others are likely to have.
    title: Tales from the trenches
    abstract: >
        The story of how RightShift scaled its business and architecture to
        successfully compete in the competitive social casino arena with their
        flagship Clickfun Casino product. Daniel shares first-hand insight into
        scaling a modern business and high-volume platform and is as much an
        enlightening tale of getting things right as a cautionary tale of what not
        to do.

  daniel_schauenberg:
    name: Daniel Schauenberg
    company: Etsy
    role: Software Engineer
    country: USA
    quote: Automation, documentation and simplicity are his usual tools
    twitter: mrtazz
    bio: >
        is a Software Engineer in Etsy's infrastructure and development tools
        team. Automation, documentation and simplicity are his usual tools for
        improving the status quo. He previously worked in systems and network
        administration, on connecting chemical plants to IT systems and as an embedded
        systems networking engineer. Things he thoroughly enjoys when not writing code
        include coffee, breakfast, TV shows and basketball.
    title: Scaling Deployment at Etsy
    abstract: >
        At Etsy we have over 100 engineers deploying more than 40 times a day. This
        culture of continuously deploying small change sets enables us to build and
        release robust features all while serving over a billion page views per month.
        In order to make sure we can keep up this pace, we have development and
        deployment infrastructure in place that makes it comfortable and simple to
        make changes. So simple that as an engineer at Etsy you deploy the site on
        your first day - even if you're a dog.
        </p>
        <p>
        But how is it possible to deploy so frequently among so many engineers and yet
        maintain a stable system? To answer this I give a high-level overview of the
        basic application structure to introduce the specific architecture we have at
        Etsy and how our development environment is set up. For development, every
        engineer gets their own VM with the full application stack configured. This
        makes it easy to get started and puts every developer in the same, familiar
        setup. This is a crucial part in removing confusion and ambiguity about how to
        work on and deploy changes.
        </p>
        <p>
        For the actual deployment we use a one-button deploy system - Deployinator -
        which we developed and opensourced. We integrated our system tightly with our
        company-wide IRC server and a set of tools we built to foster confidence,
        fast feedback and easy communication and collaboration between engineers. A
        detailed overview will be given on how the system works, how we use it and
        what problems we had to solve while making sure everyone can deploy as easily
        and fast as possible.
        </p>
        <p>
        The central source of confidence in our development process is our CI system.
        We have developed an easy way for developers to run tests on the CI cluster
        while developing to test changes before going into the deploy pipeline.
        Additionally tests are run on deploy and initiated by engineers with a tool
        called 'try' across 200 build machines. Our cluster setup is explained along
        with what problems we hit with an ever-growing codebase and number of
        engineers, and how we made our current setup fast.
        </p>
        <p>
        Continuous Deployment and the ability to quickly make changes are crucial for
        moving fast and iterating on products. Our deployment system works very well
        and is keeping up with the demands of a growing site and team. After attending
        this talk you will understand exactly how we approach Continuous Deployment
        and Continuous Integration at Etsy and get insight into what went wrong along
        the way and how we fixed it.

  david_tinker:
    name: David Tinker
    company: BrandsEye
    role: Lead Engineer
    country: SA
    twitter: david_tinker
    bio: >
        is Lead Engineer at BrandsEye, the online brand monitoring
        and analysis software. BrandsEye processes large volumes (3 million+) of
        tweets and other brand mentions every day, contextualising and annotating
        them with sentiment, credibility and so forth.
    title: Transitioning your architecture to scale
    abstract: >
        The BrandsEye team have spent the last year or so transitioning from a
        single monolithic application with serious performance issues into a
        loosely coupled collection of applications able to handle very much
        higher volumes at far greater reliability. The new system uses a lot of
        interesting technology (RabbitMQ, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, Postgresql,
        Grails, Java, etc.) to solve various real-world problems. In this talk
        David goes into detail on the challenges and learnings encountered
        along the way.

  dietrich_featherston:
    name: Dietrich Featherston
    company: Boundary
    role: Software Engineer
    country: USA
    quote: Dropped out of school to build an awesome analytics database which powers Boundary
    twitter: d2fn
    website: http://d2fn.com
    bio: >
        is an engineer who dropped out of grad school to
        build the <a href='https://vimeo.com/42902962'>analytics database</a>
        powering Boundary. He has spent the last 12 years of his career
        focused on making complex information accessible to humans and
        has written a handful of query languages in that time. When he
        is not busy shipping code, it can be assumed that Dietrich is
        hiding somewhere along the
        <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_River_(Missouri)'>Current River</a>.
    title: Insights into NoSQL at Boundary.com
    abstract: Coming soon

  kenny_gryp:
    name: Kenny Gryp
    company: Percona
    role: Engineer
    country: USA
    bio: coming soon
    title: High-Performance MySQL
    abstract: Coming soon

  mike_jones:
    name: Mike Jones
    company: Western Cape Labs
    role: Jack of all trades
    country: SA
    quote: I started out with nothing and I still have most of it left
    twitter: imsickofmaps
    bio: >
        works at Western Cape Labs, which he helped form in 2012. He calls himself
        a "jack of all trades, master of some", which really just means he has to
        make his own coffee (and likes to shout "MARKETING" randomly at
        conferences). Born and raised in London, but now resident in Cape Town with
        his growing family, he appreciates all that the city has to offer as an
        awesome place to build a socially valuable business.
    title: I started out with nothing and I've still got most of it left
    abstract: >
        It has never been easy to turn your ideas into a real scalable business, but
        these days, with the rise of the tech incubator, it seems like it's
        something that everyone is meant to be doing. This talk hopes to provide
        some insight based on real-world experience from someone who has tried and
        failed a number of times, and in 2012 decided to try again right here in
        Cape Town.  Inspired by last year's ScaleConf, he'll tell us how On The Way (a
        service run by Western Cape Labs) went in six months from an idea to a
        thing you'd hopefully happily send your mum to.

  miles_ward:
    name: Miles Ward
    company: Amazon
    role: Evangelist
    country: USA
    quote: A decade of experience building global-scale analysis infrastructures
    twitter: milesward
    bio: >
        is a three-time technology startup entrepreneur with a decade of experience
        building global-scale analysis infrastructures. Miles has been at Amazon
        Web Services since 2010 and is responsible for designing and developing AWS
        Solution Architectures relating to big data and social analytics,
        multi-tiered storage, HA and DR approaches for RDBMS systems, and cost
        optimisation.
    title: >
        Little teams with big results: NASA/JPL and Obama for America via AWS
    abstract: >
        In 2012 two small teams set about delivering on massive expectations, on
        "failure-is-not-an-option" projects, with extraordinarily limited time and
        resources. Both teams nailed it: every space geek in the world saw the Mars
        Curiosity Rover's first images live from Amazon S3 and Cloudfront and
        watched an HD live-stream of the event, and the 170+ custom applications on
        AWS powering the radical Obama for America campaign played no small part in
        helping President Obama win his bid for re-election.  Miles Ward, your
        presenter, worked embedded within these teams during the design, development,
        testing, deployment and operational phases of these projects, and can relay
        a few critical insights about the use of cloud at this scale.  100,000 WCU
        DynamoDB tables; replicating 27TB across the continent; 60+ terabit/s of
        live-streamed video; over a billion dollars in processed donations;
        hundreds of instances, 528,000 IOPS, oh my!

  neil_blakey_milner:
    name: Neil Blakey-Milner
    company: Facebook
    role: Production Engineering Manager
    country: USA
    twitter: nxsy
    title: Scaling at Facebook
    bio: >
        is a Production Engineering Manager at Facebook, and previously was an early employee and lead engineer at KnowledgeTree and Yola.
    abstract: Coming soon

  ri_pienaar:
    name: R.I. Pienaar
    company: PuppetLabs
    role: Senior Developer
    country: UK
    twitter: ripienaar
    bio: >
        coming soon
    title: What DevOps isn't
    abstract: >
        Coming soon

  robert_stuttaford:
    name: Robert Stuttaford
    company: Cognician
    role: CTO
    country: SA
    twitter: RobStuttaford
    bio: >
        is the CTO at Cognician, a local tech startup working on
        improving people's thinking. Now, going into its fourth year with a brand
        new, completely re-imagined technology stack, Cognician is providing value
        as a digital platform for self-coaching, performance support and much, much
        more.</p>
        <p>Robert has been coding for 15 years and is still not dead. Having worked in
        all facets of web development for a wide variety of use cases and people,
        he is happily astonished at how much fun he's still having, thanks in no
        small part to the Clojure language and its philosophy and community.
    title: Cognician's new architecture with Clojure and Datomic
    abstract:
        Robert will tour through Cognician's new architecture and ops
        infrastructure, which leverages the many advantages of Clojure - such as
        functional programming, immutable data and deep Java interop - and Datomic,
        a new database engine from the creator of Clojure, which solves many of the
        common data-handling concerns when scaling web applications, so that
        scaling is far more simple to reason about and accomplish.

all_speakers: [ beat_schwegler, dale_humby, daniel_fiske, daniel_schauenberg, david_tinker, dietrich_featherston, mike_jones, miles_ward, neil_blakey_milner, ri_pienaar, robert_stuttaford ]
highlighted: [ daniel_fiske, mike_jones, daniel_schauenberg, miles_ward, dietrich_featherston ]
nonhighlighted: [ neil_blakey_milner, robert_stuttaford, david_tinker, beat_schwegler, dale_humby ]
sponsors:
  gold:
    - name: 2go
      about: Free mobile messaging serving millions of users
    - name: RightShift
      about: Social Gaming
  silver:
    - name: Amazon
    - name: Praekelt
    - name: RSAWeb
  bronze:
    - name: Basho
    - name: Brandseye
  event:
    - name: Github
    - name: Key Connections
programme:
  - day: Wednesday Evening, 17th April
    schedule:
      - time: 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm
        event: Pre-conference drinks
        description: The opening event will be sponsored by GitHub, at a venue to be announced. This will be a chance to socialise and network with the speakers, organisers, and fellow conference attendees
  - day: Thursday, 18th April
    schedule:
      - time: 8:00 am - 9:00 am
        event: Registration
        description: Tea and coffee will be served
      - time: 9:00 am - 9:15 am
        event: Opening
        description: A quick welcome and introduction to the conference before we get going
      - time: 9:30 am - 10:15 am
        speaker: daniel_schauenberg
      - time: 10:15 am - 10:25 am
        event: Break
        description: A quick changeover and pee-break
      - time: 10:25 am - 11:10 am
        speaker: dale_humby
      - time: 11:10 am - 11:40 am
        event: Break
        description: Mid-morning tea & coffee with scones and biscuits
      - time: 11:40 am - 12:25 am
        speaker: daniel_fiske
      - time: 12:30 am - 2:00 pm
        event: Lunch
        description: A buffet lunch provided by Moyo and some time to chill in the Botanical Gardens
      - time: 2:00 pm - 2:45 pm
        speaker: neil_blakey_milner
      - time: 2:45 pm - 3:15 pm
        event: Break
        description: Afternoon tea & coffee with biscuits
      - time: 3:15 pm - 4:00 pm
        speaker: beat_schwegler
      - time: 4:00 pm - 4:15 pm
        event: Break
        description: A quick changeover & pee-break
      - time: 4:15 pm - 5:00 pm
        speaker: ri_pienaar
  - day: Thursday evening, 18th April
    schedule:
      - time: 6:00 pm - 11:00 pm
        event: Party
        description: RightShift are sponsoring the evening event, which will include pizza and drinks at a venue to be announced
  - day: Friday, 19th April
    schedule:
      - time: 8:30 am - 9:00 am
        event: Arrival
        description: Tea and coffee will be served
      - time: 9:00 am - 9:30 am
        event: The state of scaling
        description: A representative from 2go will talk briefly on where things are for scalability in Africa
      - time: 9:30 am - 10:15 am
        speaker: mike_jones
      - time: 10:15 am - 10:25 am
        event: Break
        description: A quick changeover & pee-break
      - time: 10:25 am - 11:10 am
        speaker: dietrich_featherston
      - time: 11:10 am - 11:40 am
        event: Break
        description: Mid-morning tea & coffee with scones and biscuits
      - time: 11:40 am - 12:25 am
        speaker: robert_stuttaford
      - time: 12:30 am - 1:45 pm
        event: Lunch
        description: A buffet lunch provided by Moyo and some time to chill in the Botanical Gardens
      - time: 1:45 pm - 2:30 pm
        speaker: david_tinker
      - time: 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
        event: Break
        description: Afternoon tea & coffee with biscuits
      - time: 3:00 pm - 3:45 pm
        speaker: miles_ward
      - time: 3:45 pm - 4:00 pm
        event: Break
        description: A quick changeover & pee-break
      - time: 4:00 pm - 4:45 pm
        speaker: kenny_gryp
  - day: Friday evening, 19th April
    schedule:
      - time: 6:00 pm - 11:00 pm
        event: Party
        description: Closing party with pizza and beer provided, sponsored by KeyConnections