some more facts about speaking at !!Con (May 9-10 in NYC)
- $256 honorarium
- we can pay for your travel if your employer won't
- all proposals are anonymous
- we often accept talks from first-time speakers
- the deadline to submit is March 1 :D
I'd especially love a talk submission from you if any of these are true:
- you find that people like you are underrepresented at conferences
- you've never given a talk before
- we've rejected a talk submission from you before.
Something that's different about !!Con talk proposals is that we require a *timeline* of how you'll use your 10 minutes (anonymous proposals mean we need a bit more detail to know that it's going to be a great talk)
why is it important that DNS distributes control? right now I have that countries can keep their DNS infrastructure (almost) entirely out of the US
I'm thinking about this because I've seen explanations that DNS is decentralized ten billion times but I don't think I've seen it broken down why that actually matters in practice
I guess another way of asking this is -- why do some organizations choose to operate their own authoritative DNS servers?
A lot of my writing is fueled by my frustrations trying to learn things, like "Wait, all that impenetrable jargon and THAT'S all you were trying to say? Why didn't you just SAY SO?". So I try to make the explanation I wish I'd found.
I'm also really motivated by seeing other people having a hard time learning something. Often I look at the resources a friend is using and it'll be so clear that it's not a helpful explanation for them
I have a lot of confidence in my ability to understand things so if an explanation doesn't make sense to me I'm pretty quick to conclude "well obviously the problem is with the explanation, not with ME" (though obviously this approach doesn't always work out for me haha)
i've been working on a website to let you do DNS experiments and as always I'm surprised by how many design decisions there are to make for such a small-scale project
even leaving the UX design aside (which is so hard!!), I have absolutely 0 motivation to do maintenance work on my projects, so I need to be careful now to make sure I don't have to do maintenance later
one decision was whether to make the DNS server distributed to improve latency. I decided to run just 1 server with the HTTP server and DNS server sharing a process because managing distributed systems really sucks and it's an educational project, it's ok if it's a bit slow
something I don't understand about BGP: can I (as a Regular Person with no special privileges) actually look up past BGP route announcements to see where facebook withdrew its BGP routes? how/where do I do it?
I now have links to a lot of tools but I still don't really understand how to use/interpret them, I feel like I need a screencast of someone explaining how to use one of these tools to look at this facebook issue :)
like this BGPlay interface is not that intuitive. maybe 129.134.30.12/24 is the wrong subnet and I should be looking at something else?
if you've been working in computing for > 15 years -- are there fundamentals that you learned "on the job" 15 years ago that you think most people aren't learning on the job today?
(I'm thinking about how for example nobody has ever paid me to write C code)
I'm especially interested in topics that are still relevant today (like C programming) but are just harder to pick up at work now than they used to be
(the reason I'm asking is that I think that there are some fundamentals that are really hard to learn today, and I think it might be because we work with more abstractions in our jobs so it's harder to see the fundamentals than it used to be)