USENIX's SREcon conference is the best venue for learning the latest in systems engineering (not just site reliability engineering) and if you have useful production stories and takeaways to share -- especially if you are in the Asia/Pacific region -- please consider submitting a talk proposal to SREcon APAC 2023. The call for participation ends on March 2nd, only two weeks away. It is held this year in Singapore, June 14-16, and I'm excited to be program co-chair with fellow Aussie Jamie Wilkinson. To quote from our CFP:

You build computer platforms, debug them, and support them, and you have learned something useful to share: You are invited to submit proposals to give talks at SREcon23 Asia/Pacific, which welcomes speakers from a variety of backgrounds, not just SRE, and from a variety of different-sized companies, not just those that are technology-focused. Your insights will help create a relevant, diverse, and inclusive program. Conversations are never complete when they focus just on successes; we encourage talks that focus on lessons learned from failures or hard problems.

At the seventh SREcon Asia/Pacific, we are especially seeking the deepest engineering talks: Those that cover gritty technical internals, advanced tools and techniques, and complex problems that may matter to others, whether your solutions were elegant, ugly, or unsuccessful.

We look forward to learning from speakers across the SRE and systems engineering space. This year we particularly welcome new speakers; many of our best talks have come from people with new perspectives to share and the last few years most certainly has given us all new experiences and stories we can share and from which we can learn.

At every SREcon globally, we welcome and encourage participation from all individuals in any country, including people that are underrepresented in, or excluded from, technology, including but not limited to: people of all colours, women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, neurodiverse participants, students, veterans, and others with unique characteristics.

Similarly, we welcome participants from diverse professional roles: QA testers, performance engineers, security teams, OS engineers, DBAs, network administrators, compliance experts, UX designers, government employees, and data scientists. Regardless of who you are or the job title you hold, if you are a technologist who faces unique challenges and shares our areas of interest, we encourage you to be a part of SREcon23 Asia/Pacific.

More details are or the CFP page.

We're especially looking to highlight local content from the Asia/Pacific region. SREcon usually has good representation of the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, etc.) but I think every company has interesting stories to share. I'd love to see deeply technical talks about production incidents, where the approaches and tools used can be widely applied by others. And I'd love to hear about the ones that got away, where current tooling and approaches are insufficient.

For many years I've helped with the USENIX LISA conference, which was the premier event for production systems engineering. In recent years attendees have moved to SREcon, which covers similar topics, and LISA 2021 may have been the last time LISA runs as a stand-alone conference (see LISA made LISA obsolete). I think LISA still exists as the people of the LISA community, many of whom are now involved with SREcon where our engineering principles live on and develop further.

If you've never been to an SREcon, check out the SREcon APAC 2022 conference page, which links to slides and videos of the talks.