This is my long-overdue trip report from last summer: July 10–11, 2024. We toured Ivy League campuses to help our rising senior son weigh his options, with our two daughters (our kids are four years apart each) tagging along for an early preview. Day one was Yale and Brown, followed by a night in New Jersey. Day two took us to Princeton and UPenn, then the long drive back to Buffalo. Of course we drove, that's howwe roll.| Metadata
This year was a bastard. Not from work. God, no, I find work relaxing. Reading papers, inventing algorithms, ripping apart distributed systems with TLA+ models -- that's how I have fun. I can do that all day with a grin on my face. But the minute I need to do adulting (like simply calling the cable company and ask why keep increasing our bill when I'm not looking), I will stress and procrastinate. And this year, I had a lot of adulting to do to put our house on market, and plan a move to Cali...| Metadata
ATC and OSDI ran in parallel. As is tradition, OSDI was single-track; ATC had two parallel tracks. The schedules and papers are online as linked above.| Metadata
This week I was in Boston for ATC/OSDI’25. Downtown Boston is a unique place where two/three-hundred-year-old homes and cobblestone streets are mixed with sleek buildings and biotech towers. The people here look wicked smart and ambitious (although lacking the optimism/cheer of Bay area people). It’s a sharp contrast from Buffalo, where the ambition is more about not standing out.| Metadata
I went to the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in NYC last week. I enjoyed it a lot but I was surprised by how little it overlapped with production/reliability conferences. Here’s my conference report.| Blog - No Idea Blog
I went to The Lead Developer New York and I loved it.| Blog - No Idea Blog
SRECon Americas was in Brooklyn this year! SRECon has always emphasised the human side of reliability and I appreciated the focus on learning and teaching, psychological safety and avoiding burnout, as well as a bunch of tech topics around keeping sites running.| Blog - No Idea Blog
I attended the TLA+ Community Event at Hamilton, Ontario on Sunday. Several talks pushed the boundaries of formal methods in the real world...| muratbuffalo.blogspot.com