For the YOW! Conference Australia 2018 tour I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote talk about performance analysis at Netflix. I summarized the Netflix stack and explained how we examine performance problems cloud-wide, and then how we can drill down to instances using flame graphs and other tools. In some ways it is like a 60 minute boot-camp for new hires (if you're about to start work at Netflix, or just did, you should find it valuable).

The video is on youtube:

The slides are on slideshare (or as a PDF):

As I'm Australian and I've heard good things about YOW!, I wanted to do a great job back in my country of origin. I gave a similar talk in 2014 (you can watch it or compare the slides to see how much has changed in 4 years), and I'd been meaning to update it one day, but knew it would take weeks of work. For YOW!, I made the time to do this, and ended up prepping more than I have for any other talk. This continued during YOW! with help from the organizers and other speakers (special thanks to Dave and Aino). The video above is from my second talk in Brisbane, where I had improved it based on feedback.

In hindsight, I think I went too deep for a keynote. Since it is also takes weeks to update – summarizing the current state of the ever-changing Netflix stack, and getting new screenshots for all the tools – I doubt I'll be giving it again. I'm glad it was caught on video (thank you Richard for doing a quality job.)

There was a typo in my slides: it said we had >130k members, but should have said >130m members. (I guess >130k is technically true, but yes, it was a typo!)

Since YOW! Australia is a tour of three cities, I ended up spending a lot of time with the organizers and other speakers, in a way that doesn't happen at other conferences. I met many great people and I hope to see them again sometime. This was easily my favorite experience as a speaker.