Digging in on the Gluecon Agenda

As we turn into the new year, I'm digging in on the Gluecon agenda. We've got some early keynoters confirmed in Dr. KellyAnn Fitzpatrick (Redmonk), Tim Wagner (Coinbase), Leah McGowen-Hare (Salesforce), and Dormain Drewitz (Pivotal). In addition, I've placed some sessions around machine learning with AWS DeepLens, leveraging gRPC and Kubernetes, API lifecycle management, chaos engineering, distributed tracing, Istio, etc. And now the fun begins...I'm looking for deeply technical talks in areas like DevOps, Microservices, Containers, Engineering Best Practices, Machine Learning (and AI), developing on the blockchain, as well as content specific to topics like Rust, graphQL, gRPC, Helm, Envoy, Consul, Fluentd, etc. Bottom-line: if it's technical (the more the better) and it hasn't been presented at every conference in North America, then I'd like to see it.A quick note on first time speakers and diversity: 1) we love first time speakers. Kim and I pride ourselves on working to make sure that Gluecon is a welcoming environment. If you've never spoken before, and have a topic you think you're ready to speak about, please submit. I think you'll find a room full of folks looking to learn (not criticize); 2) if you're in an under-represented group in tech, PLEASE SUBMIT. Diversity and Inclusion have been front of mind for us for years, and we'll be working on it this year (as we do every year).I'm really energized about this year's Gluecon -- partly (and maybe perversely) because I think we're at the end of a upswing in the economic cycle (and heading into a downturn). I embrace economic downturns. AMAZING things happen during economic downturns. Blogs, RSS, the early kernels of AWS, APIs -- all of these things came to life during downturns. Downturns suck the noise out of the room and leave us with more signal. I hope you'll join me in embracing any downturn. All of the "cloud" stuff we've been working on since 2005 is about to get adopted by the late adopters, and that opens up green-space for those of us that thrive on developing things to go do something NEW. Amen and hallelujah!Lastly, if you don't plan to speak, but you have a topic you'd like to see covered, reach out (enorlin[at]mac[dot]com) -- and we'll work to see what we can dig up.Join us for what is going to be an incredibly exciting, over-the top welcoming, and technically challenging Gluecon.