I've done my fair share of automating computers and deploying processes. Many things have been said and written and after reading the conference schedule I wasn't sure what to add. Lately, though, I've become intrigued by how computers are automating humans, that is, the creation of photorealistic humans and virtual environments also known as 'synthetic media'.

I will take you on a tour across lipsynching, face swapping, voice cloning and capturing 3d modelling humans. How close are we at generating humans and what does it mean for our society? From Hollywood VFX over virtual production to AI-generated humans via GAN models and deepfakes, I'd like to explain the topics in a technical engineering way to inspire people in this exciting new field.

In 2010 the DevOps movement set about solving the blockage on the path to production. The wall of confusion. Developers would throw new software releases, new features and new products over the wall to operations who were tasked with supporting these apps in production. As a community, we've been tearing down the wall of confusion for a decade (sometimes building new and different walls where it stood) and we've learnt a thing or two along the way. In this talk, Hannah will reflect on how we've often "shifted left" the wrong way, and how we might approach this familiar problem in new ways that set our teams up for success. 

Music Information Retrieval deals with the development of technologies to facilitate access to large music collections. In this talk, I will provide an overview of data-driven algorithms for the description of music content, with a focus on audio, and how they can be exploited to enhance music listening experiences through visualizations or recommendations. I will comment on the challenges we encounter when dealing with music data, the approaches used to incorporate musical and acoustic knowledge into machine learning models, and the wide possible range of application contexts, from music platforms to personalised music therapy. I will illustrate the talk with a set of demos of software libraries or prototypes I have contributed to in my work.

It's 2022. Developers have seen it all. They've tried it all. But it seems all is just not enough. The quest for simple has led us to a path of complexity that is often needless. Or is it? Was it all just a lie? Was it all about job security?

As the world moves towards businesses that demand even more developer resources, can we as an industry come together and think about how we can make the world a simpler place? Or will complexity take over even more?

In Part 2 of Silver Bullet Syndrome, we'll see where we are as an industry, and more importantly, have we finally found the Silver Bullet. 

Observability is the capability to continuously generate and discover actionable insights based on signals from a system under observation, with the goal to influence the system. Stepping back a bit, this is really about data engineering, from pipelines to efficiently storing and retrieving data points to visualizations to applying Machine Learning to automate certain tasks. In this talk we will have a look at the challenges we face in the observability space and how open source and open specifications can help to move the community forward.

In recent years the software industry has begun to pay attention to the field of Resilience Engineering, a relatively new field that studies complex systems and how they behave under unexpected conditions. One concept that has emerged from Resilience Engineering is Graceful Extensibility. Systems that have a high degree of Graceful Extensibility are not brittle: they do not collapse quickly when unusual demands are made on them, and they can adapt to changing conditions.

Many kinds of natural systems demonstrate graceful extensibility - Dr Richard Cook’s talk on the resiliency of bone is a perfect example. Software systems, unfortunately, are typically much more brittle than organic systems - even the largest organisation experiences outages. There is no silver bullet to address the problem that the sheer complexity of software systems causes. However, there are a number of architectural and organisational patterns that we can use to increase the Graceful Extensibility of our systems: from basic circuitbreaking and ratelimiting to more advanced design concepts such as constant-work systems and cellular architectures, as well as organisational practices that help us to spot the signals that our systems are approaching their limits. This talk will dive into these technical and organisational elements of resiliency in distributed software systems.