Scale By the Bay 2023
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Friends — after the pandemic online twilight zone, Scale By the Bay, the most human-centric of the few remaining independent developer conferences, is coming back in-person on November 13–15, on the shores of the Lake Merritt in Oakland! We’ve found a new and amazing home at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center, a historical building with marble floors, wood panels, an enormous pillared amphitheater, and a cozy feeling with endless nooks and crannies where the hallway track, community meetings, are happening all along.
The theme for this year is Code and Data in the Age of AI. We do what we always do best — take a hot topic, Generative AI this year, and take it apart technically to make it clear and useful to developers. We start with the bespoke, all-day, hands-on training we always create and run as a part of SBTB — Test-Driven Development with LLMs. We bring in Full-Stack Deep Learning, a venerable boot camp crew that pioneered technical deep dives into deep learning where people fly in from around the world. Their LLM Bootcamp in the Spring was sold out and this is your chance to attend the next version.
The LLM talks include the keynote by Leah McGuire, an SBTB icon who shows use cases for LLMs in industry, David Hall, head of engineering at Stanford Center for Research in Foundation Models with Levanter, a new JAX framework for training them. Omar Khattab will present DSPy, an LLM framework that supersedes prompts. Vectara will take apart hallucinations. Bassem Yacoube will show how to use LangChain and LlamaIndex to solve a variety of tasks with structured and unstructured data.
Our core distributed systems track is especially strong this year. We have Yugabyte making a multiregion distributed database out of Postgres. We show how massive data preparation is done at scale, for data-centric AI. We plush the limits of databases with the Nile. We have the Parquet inventor outline what’s next from Arrow to OpenLineage. Small is beautiful again with DuckDB, and we have mother ducks to show us in-process analytics. Metaflow, presented first at SBTB from Netflix, is now a startup, and we’ll learn all about orchestrating large-scale GenAI on Kubernetes with them!
And underneath it all is the bedrock of thoughtful software engineering. We bridge the gaps of Python world and scale via Arrow and DuckDB with Jim Dowling. We see how mesh is done with Rust at Linkerd, which grew with SBTB. We grok Bazel and Gradle inside out. We learn about Nix and NixOS in production. We see how to rewrite massive Scala codebases into Rust. We learn about the new framework, Hydro, coming up the pike from Sky Lab, a successor to AMP and RISE ones, with Shadaj Laddad, who started at Scala meetups at 7, now a PhD candidate at Berkeley, showing us what to focus on going forward!
And after many years of trying, we are welcoming Chris Lattner, the creator of LLVM, Swift, and Mojo, to a fireside chat. Our signature panels are on Streaming and LLM engineering.
