And relax...

Posted on Fri 23 March 2007 by alex in general

It all seemed to go surprisingly well. I was preceded by James' rather interesting talk on planning for failure at Google. It was suggested that they might actually have the data to prove if there was a correlation between random data errors and solar flare activity. I wondered if correlating failures on their data centres around the world could be used to pin point gamma ray bursts although I'm not sure their time stamps would be accurate enough.

After James' grilling at the hands of a room full of Unix geeks I was worried my talk would seem boring in comparison. I shouldn't of worried. Although there were a few questions I couldn't answer (like James because our companies didn't want to talk about them) I got plenty of questions fielded. After the talk a number of people came by to ask more detailed questions and talk about potential deployments which was a good sign. Sun where also there and a few of their kernel engineers came over to ask a few more detailed techie questions about how we achieved some of the things we did.

All in all I enjoyed the event a lot. I shouldn't of worried so much about giving the presentation and I got to do some "customer facing" work. No I'm not about to sell my soul to marketing, it's just broadening my base ;-)