Scale 23x Retrospective

Looking Back On SCALE 23x

What Is It?

SCALE is North America's largest community-run open source conference.

Over the course of four days, I attended the SCALE 23x conference in Pasadena, CA. I attended talks, workshops, and made lots of friends and new acquaintances! This post will cover my goals, my experience, and the things I learned along the way :)

Why Did I Go?

When I signed up, I was purely thinking of this conference as a chance to level up my skills and learn about the various tools that are becoming ubiquitous in the software development world. I attended a small tech conference a very long time ago, so I didn't know what to expect.

In the time it took me to walk from the Exhibit Hall entrance to badge pickup, a couple of things caught my eye: pods of coworkers scurrying up and down the hall, people hunched over in every nook and cranny, laser focused on their laptops. It felt like a mixture of the office and a school campus. Despite showing up by myself, I felt oddly at home. This was the precursor to feeling very excited, and dare I say, having a lot of fun.

Alt: A map of the Pasadena Conference Center, annotated to demonstrate the approximate distance travelled before realization sets in.

What Did I Hope To Achieve?

I actually had picked out my schedule about a week beforehand. I recall picking as many talks that were explicitly there to teach me something new. My schedule was full of talks like, "What's new in Postgres 18" and "Three Pillars of Observability". I suppose I was hoping to pick concepts that I had decent understanding on and use the talks as a chance to explore the topic a bit further.

I would say this approach morphed pretty quickly. There were a handful of technologies and concepts that were being mentioned across several talks (see below). The more I heard about them, the more I realized I was missing out on something important. This only compounded as I began meeting other attendees. I made sure to ask everyone what they were excited about, and I made it a point to attend a talk on the subject. Some might call this FOMO, and that's just fine by me.

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out.
A surprisingly compelling algorithm for selecting conference talks.

What Did I Learn?

Here is a short list of topics that, previously, I had no idea existed:

Proxmox: a virtualization platform that lets you run multiple isolated VMs on a single machine

Tailscale: a mesh VPN service, which garnered lots of excitement from platform engineers to homelab enjoyers

Immutability: represents configuration-first system design (I knew about Docker, but I didn't know it could apply to the OS)

ePBF: plugin-style programs that run inside the Linux kernel, useful for improving firewalls to MCP

Atproto: decentralized social network, splits up provider services for user's identity, data storage, and content delivery

RISC-V: an open-source CPU architecture

OpenSearch: an open source vector database, specializing in non-normalized / semi-structured data

I suppose you can never really escape the old adage, "You Don't Know What You Don't Know". If you want to see a full list of the talks and workshops I attended, scroll down to the section, Appendix: My Schedule.

Alt: "You don't know what you don't know" text adjacent to man pondering the existence of a giant question mark.

What Were My Takeaways?

Tech conferences are not just about the things you learn, it's about the friends you make along the way. . . But a lot of it is the things you learn. I've already mentioned some of the technical concepts that are now on my radar. Here are my top overall lessons that I've gleaned from this conference:

1. Everyone has something to teach

I think it's all to easy to fall into the mindset that you know everything you need to know, or that there are only certain people who can offer new perspectives. I went into this conference with the mindset that I was here to learn from everybody, and I think it was a grand success. If you invite people to provide a new perspective, or simply share what they are excited about, you're bound to learn something new. It's a win-win.

2. Ask stupid questions for all to see

I think everyone will agree, there is no such thing as a stupid question. Perhaps that is why I always feel compelled to participate in the FAQ or to follow up with the speaker afterwards. I don't know why, but, asking a well formulated question feels a bit like catching a butterfly without a net; once you have the question in your mind, what are the chances you can keep it there long enough to articulate it? Perhaps it's a me problem -- thanks, brain!

I'm not sure this is a takeaway so much as it's a reminder that I asked some silly questions and I survived. I guess, for my first SCALE, this is an acceptable outcome.

Takeaway #3: Do the thing and size it right

I think one of the most poignant talks, for me, came at the end of the Saturday: Five Stages of Grieving - Databases in Infrastructure as Code . The talk briefly explained how we should be wary of becoming over ambitious with popular devops tools. It turns out there can be many downsides to creating an infrastructural clusterf@#$ at your workplace (doing so at home is fine). I suppose this is what pushed me into the homelab direction, so we'll see how it goes!

Finally: SCALE, By The Numbers

So! All in all, I attended...

1 Workshop

10 Talks

2 Birds of a Feather (BoF)

6 Expo Booths

1 Career Day

1 Keynote

A few extra factoids...

Price of Parking: too much

Price of Nearby Burritos: too much (but filling)

Interest In Attending Next Year: very keen

I hope you enjoyed my first blog post. I certainly enjoyed writing it. I won't do as much journalistic reporting in the future, but do stick around if you want to hear about the things I'm creating in the future!

Yours truly,

/\/\ /-\ \_/
|RAYNE

Appendix: My Schedule

Thursday

Workshop: Self-hosting a Secure Home Lab

BoF: When Did You Realize You Were Building the Wrong Thing?

Friday

Ask and You Shall Debug: Conversational Troubleshooting for Kubernetes

Extreme Home Labbing: Building Large Scale Computing with Small Scale Budgets

Platform Engineering Starts at the Node: The Power of Immutable Operating Systems

What's in a Kubernetes Data Platform? Let's Build One!

BoF: Solarpunk Developers Group

Saturday

AT: The Billion-Edge Open Social Graph

Solving Pre-silicon Kernel Upstream for RISC-V First Ever

AI in Costco's Shipping Process

Engineering at Ludicrous Speed: How AI Is Reshaping Infra and Engineering

Five Stages Of Grieving-Databases in Infrastructure as Code

Sunday

Open Source Career Day

Check Your Own Boxes: How I Used My Blog To Land My First Job In Tech

OpenSearch: Your Friendly Neighborhood Vector Database

Keynote: Software Distribution Now And Then - Why And How The Internet Changed Everything

Resources

GitHub · Change is constant. GitHub keeps you ahead.

Join the world's most widely adopted, AI-powered developer platform where millions of developers, businesses, and the largest open source community build software that advances humanity.

SCALE 23x | SCALE

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is North America’s largest community-run open source conference.