SUBSTRATE
// A single-day conference for people who build the layer everything else runs on.
> Systems programming. Infrastructure. Distributed systems.
> No marketing talks. No sponsor pitches.
> Just builders talking to builders.
EXECUTION_LOG
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Boring Infrastructure
Why the most reliable systems are the ones nobody talks about. A defense of choosing proven over novel, and knowing when to break that rule.
Building a Storage Engine: Lessons from the Abyss
What happens when you decide "we'll just build our own block storage." SPDK, NVMe-oF, RDMA, and all the ways data can silently corrupt when you're not looking.
Firecracker in Production: A Year of MicroVMs
Sub-200ms boot times, ephemeral CI runners, and the operational reality of running thousands of microVMs. Including the parts that don't make the blog post.
DNS is a Database (Treat It Like One)
Zone transfers, TSIG authentication, and why your authoritative DNS server is secretly the most critical distributed database in your stack.
Zero-Copy Networking: From Theory to 10Gbps
DPDK, io_uring, AF_XDP — the userspace networking landscape. When to use each, what to avoid, and actual benchmark numbers that aren't cherry-picked.
IAM from Scratch: Writing Your Own Policy Engine
Implementing AWS-style resource policies without AWS. The evaluation algorithm, caching strategies, and why "deny overrides allow" is more nuanced than it sounds.
Observability is Not Logging
Structured events over log lines. How we rebuilt our observability stack around traces and reduced mean-time-to-resolution by 4x.
The One-Person Cloud Team
What it takes to build compute, storage, DNS, IAM, and a console as a single engineer. Architecture decisions, tradeoffs, and the things you ship at 3am that you're still proud of.
MOUNT_POINT
The Courtyard
Brigade Road, Bangalore 560001
root@venue:~# cat description.txt
An old converted warehouse with good acoustics, bad parking, and excellent filter coffee. We chose it because it doesn't look like a conference venue.