A couple weeks ago I went to Systems we Love! There’s a list of all the talks here. A few of my favorites: (they’re all 20 minutes)

A Race Detector Unfurled by Kavya Joshi was definitely my favorite talk of the conference. She explains how the Go race detector works super super clearly. I didn’t know anything about the topic, and now I do!

7074 says Hello World by Marianne Bellotti was another of my favorites. I think sadly it wasn’t recorded, but it talked about where mainframes fit in in the US government’s technology, and about what it’s like to have to integrate with them.

I liked Less Ado about NTP, mostly because it laid out really clearly the assumptions about the NTP system, specifically that the latency from computer A to computer B is the same as the latency from computer B to computer A. It made me want to learn more about NTP!

DNS and the Art of Making Systems “Just Complex Enough” by Alex Wilson is an interesting discussion about the design of DNS. It talks about how the DNS spec goes out of its way to say “hey, if you don’t understand a record, you have to pass it on verbatim”. This is a great example of a design decision that helps you upgrade a protocol gradually over time!

An AWK Love Story is also super good. I’ve been confused by awk for a long time and this helped me understand a little better how it’s used.