I have spoken at conferences, meetups, and academic seminars on distributed systems, database design, observability, and engineering leadership. Below is a selection of talks I have given over the years.
Conferences
Build Your Own Distributed System Using Go
GopherCon 2023 · San Diego, CA
A hands-on walkthrough of building a distributed key-value store using Go and the Hashicorp Raft library. The talk covers distributed consensus, snapshotting, log compaction, and the practical differences between distributing a simple key-value store versus a more complex storage engine like BoltDB.
Observing Observability
DevOpsDays Galway 2019 · Galway, Ireland
A version of my Monitorama 2019 talk, delivered at DevOpsDays.
Observing Observability
Monitorama 2019 · Baltimore, MD
Why observability and monitoring systems struggle to meet their goals, and why they are so hard to build. Drawing on my experience at Loggly, InfluxData, and Google Cloud, I examine the recurring patterns and mistakes teams make when building these systems at scale.
Infrastructure at Scale: Apache Kafka, Twitter Storm & Elasticsearch
AWS re:Invent 2013· Las Vegas, NV
Co-presented with Jim Nisbet (CTO, Loggly). A presentation of how Loggly built its second-generation multi-tenant, geo-distributed, real-time log management system on AWS, using Kafka, Storm, and Elasticsearch. This architecture we presented became widely adopted as the standard pattern for large-scale log aggregation systems.
Academic
rqlite: The Distributed Database Built on Raft and SQLite
Carnegie Mellon Database Group – Vaccination Database Tech Talks, 2021
Invited by the CMU Database Group to present on rqlite’s goals, design, Raft consensus integration, SQLite embedding, testing strategy, and real-world applications.
Distributed Systems with rqlite
ACM Pittsburgh – 2018 Series
An introduction to distributed systems, the problems they solve, and how rqlite uses Raft to replicate SQLite.
Regional
Ekanite: The Syslog Server with Built-in Search
San Francisco Go Meetup
A talk on Ekanite, a syslog server I built in Go with integrated full-text search using the Bleve library.
InfluxDB and the Raft consensus protocol
San Francisco Database Meetup
As a core member of the InfluxDB development team I gave a presentation on InfluxDB internals and its use of the Raft consensus protocol.
Talking Distributed Systems at Hacker Nights
Hacker Nights
A talk on rqlite and distributed systems to the New York-based development group.
Podcasts
Cloud Logging on Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform Podcast · with Reed Taylor
A discussion of Cloud Logging, GCP’s centralised logging product, its architecture, and recent feature additions.
Audit Logging on Google Cloud Platform
Google Cloud Platform Podcast · with Oscar Guerrero
A conversation on GCP’s Audit Logging capabilities and their role in security and compliance.
rqlite and Open Source development
Contributor Podcast · hosted by Eric Anderson, Scale Venture Partners
A wide-ranging discussion on rqlite, its design, the open-source development model, and the economics of building and maintaining open-source software.
Writing on Speaking
I have also written about the craft of conference speaking itself:
Interested in having me speak? Get in touch.