Web à Québec

I had the opportunity to speak at Web à Quebéc about Serverless and the future of infrastructure.The three-day web-centric conference is part of the Semaine Numérique (Digital Week) in Quebec City and has been named the SXSW of the North by Forbes. The WAQ (as everyone calls it) was a fantastic experience from the first day.

The conference is also the largest French-speaking Web and Technology Conference and caters towards a large francophone audience. This gave me a chance to brush up a bit on my rusty school French. I spent a lot of time saying things like: “I hope it’s ok to answer in English, but you can go on in French” and “I don’t know that word in English — but tell me in French, I’ll be able to make it up.”

It’s no surprise that there were delegations from France (over 100 attendees) that made it to the conference. While talking to one of the attendees, we found out that his parents grew up around 40 kilometers from where I am currently living in Zurich. It’s a small world.

I really enjoyed the format of having two keynotes every day. The first kicked off the day and the second keynote was closed things out. I think this is a very good way to begin and end a day of learnings and community.

Maxime Boisvert talked about how Shopify scales their search infrastructure which bases on Elasticsearch with the help of Kubernetes and Go. This sparked a lot of interest because it has quite some overlap with what we do at amazee.io and it’s fantastic to hear how other people scale workloads on top of kubernetes. You can find the slides here.

Kim Goodwin talked about the values and that the way people can have impact on user experience. A very enjoyable talk that got me interested in reading “The Disney Way” because it touches on a lot of topics Kim mentioned during her talk. If this got you interested, you could find a recording of her talk here.

Another very good talk was from Diana Mounter from Github. She maintains Githubs Design System — Primer (https://primer.github.io/) and talked about how Github uses their Design system and about the interaction of color systems. Seeing those subtle changes in the design and the impact it has on the usability of github was mindblowing.

I was lucky that my session was scheduled on the first day, so I could get the nervousness of presenting out of the way and enjoy the rest of the conference :) I talked mostly about how we embrace the serverless movement and how people can get started without needing to pull everything to bits from the start. I also gave my outlook on where the serverless movement will head to.

You can find the slides and more resources over on my blog.

This conference also presented me the opportunity to travel to Canada 🇨🇦 for the first time. While in Switzerland the weather and temperatures were clearly heading into the regions where you were already thinking about a light jacket in the morning. But not so in Canada, thanks to the organizers I was told early enough to bring the warm winter clothes with me. I was glad I did as temperatures reached -12 Degrees.

As I have a few friends that already have been to Quebéc one objective was set in stone: poutine. The day before the conference Jean-Philippe took Steven and I on a small tour around the city, and we also got the chance to enjoy poutine and meet up with a few of the other speakers. It was everything I hoped it would be.

I’d like to to thank everyone for making this event happen. I know how much time is spent by volunteers to make events like this possible. From the tech teams to speaker selection, to the heralds for every speaker, and the people keeping everything going day and night — thank you for a great week!

Merci beaucoup et peut-être on se verra l’année prochaine