2025-09-27 –, D1
Subtitled: Mistakes I may have Allegedly Made
25 years ago I designed my first resilient system, addressing failures with networks, infrastructure, applications, operator errors, and with a considerable dose of youthful hubris and ignorance. I'm still building them today.
This talk covers the journey, the lessons, and current practice for building robust & resilient systems, that don't need to wake you up when they go bump in the night. It has a sprinkling of humour, of war stories, of operations, and some computer science theory.
This talk comprises 7 main themes, presented as a journey from your typical single server deployment, through to a modern distributed system spanning continents, multiple servers & applications.
Dave has spent the last 2 decades trying to stay at least 1 step ahead of The Bad Actors on the internet, starting off with OpenBSD 2.8, and the last 9 years with FreeBSD since 9.3, where he has a ports commit bit, and a prediliction for obscure functional programming languages that align with his enjoyment of distributed systems, & power tools with very sharp edges.
- Professional Yak Herder, shaving BSD-coloured yaks since ~ 2000
- FreeBSD ports@ committer
- Ansible DevOops & Elixir developer
- enjoys telemark skiing, and playing celtic folk music on a variety of instruments