NodeConf 2013

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to be able to attend NodeConf 2013. The event was held at the fantastic Walker Creek Ranch in Marin County. The Ranch certainly knows how to look after conference-goers — an amazing variety of good quality food, beautiful grounds and friendly staff made for a most enjoyable four days. It’s also somewhat breathtaking to see how many stars are visible just a bit more than an hour north of the San Francisco city lights.

I had the privilege of assisting Max Bruning (along with TJ Fontaine and Emily Tanaka-Delgado) as he put on eight consecutive introductory DTrace-and-Node sessions for classes of around 40 people each. It is of utmost importance for us as Software Engineers to walk in the world from time to time, gathering feedback from folks that use the tools we build. I had a number of very positive and productive discussions with fellow conference-goers about Node, SmartOS and our new object storage and compute product, Manta, throughout my time at the ranch.

It was both encouraging and gratifying to see — with I think few, if any, exceptions! — everybody who attended the DTrace session completing at least one of the hands-on Node debugging labs. If you missed out on attending, the slides and lab materials are available on Github. I look forward to continuing to engage with community and customer alike as we strive to get out the Good News on DTrace, and to make it more accessible to developers of all skillsets.

Hooray for NodeConf, and I’ll certainly aim to be back next year!