USENIX Blog

I’ve taken a lot of classes in my several years attending LISA, and over that time, I’ve gotten to see a lot of different teaching styles and techniques. My least favorite style (and probably yours, too) is a strict lecture, where the instructor occasionally flips through slides, but mostly reads from notes, and has no engagement, no interaction, and no interest in whether the people in attendance are getting anything from the talk.

It’s 2017. Containers are “a thing.” For real. A few years ago, we were kind of wondering if they were, or if they were just a passing fad. Those of us who were busy Getting Things Done(™) don’t have time for all of the fly-by-night technologies that show up on HackerNews for a week, only to fall by the wayside. That’s the cheap excuse I’m using to justify my lack of experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and the whole containerization movement that has crept up in the past few years.

I’m a fan of documentation. I have been, ever since I first inherited an infrastructure and had to try to figure out what the previous admin had done. I try to write decent documentation—documentation that I wish had been was there when I first tried to learn about a particular system. I also find myself doing so much that what I can keep in cache in my brain is limited, and stuff I’ve worked on tends to “page out,” so to speak. Writing good docs is an excellent way to do your future self a favor.

The following post has been collaboratively written by the co-chairs for the SREcon17 Americas conference (Liz Fong-Jones and Kurt Andersen) and several of the program committee members (Murali Suriar and Betsy Beyer). It is intended to provide greater insight into the selection process which we used for this conference and may not entirely match the strategies which other conference committees employ.