The Signal Talks We Wish We Saw In Person

The Signal Talks We Wish We Saw In Person

So, Signal happened. We’re pretty sure it happened because there are a ton of videos to prove that fact. It was a blur, a glorious blur. Amidst that blur, Matt Makai and Kevin Whinnery were running around Fort Mason herding cats, pushing out blog posts and assembling hack packs. In all the activity we missed a few talks. Here are the talks we wished we saw in person, and exactly what we were doing while the talk was happening.

[Watch all the videos from Signal here]

Kevin Whinnery – The Fox Loves Apparently Says It Loves HTTP APIs in Swift

One of the most popular sessions at Signal, but one I wasn’t able to attend, was “How Twilio Builds Twilio”. As a developer working at Twilio, but not directly on the infrastructure that powers the service, I am constantly awed at the ability of my co-workers to transform an HTTP request I send to their servers into an MMS message or phone call. In this session, our engineering VP Ott Kaukver leads a group of Twilio engineers in a session describing how engineering teams get work done at Twilio. It’s rare to interact with engineering leaders operating REST APIs and developer tools at Twilio’s level of scale, so I think this would be a great session for any person in a leadership role in their engineering organization.

What does the fox say? Apparently stuff about using HTTP APIs in Swift! All of my iOS native programming experience to date has come in Objective-C, so I was very excited to take in Leah Culver’s talk on using HTTP APIs from Swift. I was looking forward to seeing how to implement something practical, rather than the pure syntax stuff I had done in Playgrounds in Xcode previously. Leah is a skilled technical speaker whose talks I have enjoyed in the past, so I would definitely recommend her Signal talk to anyone looking to dabble in Apple’s new programming language.

Matt Makai – Just How The Hell Does Netflix Scale

I’m bummed because Netflix has open sourced a bunch of well designed and written open source tools for performing deployments on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Netflix is likely one of the top, if not the single largest user of AWS so their tools are built with many years of experience in that platform-as-a-service environment.

Mike even demoed the tools in action on the command line, going further than just talking about them through logos on slides. Seeing an example end-to-end deployment with these tools was super helpful compared to just learning about the tools in isolation.

I was running the Equip track so I missed every Insight track talk while watching every Equip track talk. Poor me.

Fear not, reader. If you suffered the same fate as Kevin and Matt and missed the Signal talks, you can re-watch them here.