I just wrapped up an incredible two days at the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, and I’m still buzzing from the experience (though admittedly quite jet-lagged as I make my way back to London for the Dremio Subsurface conference).
Day Two: Finding My Rhythm
I joined the conference on day two, starting with a wander around the exhibition hall. HeroDevs stole the show with their incredible Halloween display.
The morning sessions delivered some real gems. Moss Norman’s talk on “Solving Developer’s Problems One Video At A Time” was particularly insightful, and I’m definitely taking him up on his challenge to create a 6-10 minute video on a familiar topic to find my camera style when I get home.
Barkha Herman delivered an outstanding talk on “The Collision of Real-Time Analytics and Observability,” diving deep into why the open-source disaggregated-stack (a phrase I’ll definitely be stealing) is optimal for observability at scale. She backed up her insights with a career’s worth of case studies from some of the biggest organizations in the world.
“Scaling Advocacy Without Losing the Human Touch” really resonated with me. It was fascinating hearing about Budhaditya Bhattacharya’s approach to thoughtfully incorporating AI into his practice without losing the human element that makes developer advocacy special.
Then came my own talk. Following one of my dev rel heroes, Olena Kutsenko, is always a tough act (I’m really looking forward to seeing the recording of her talk!). I ran through the latest iteration of my flight radar talk, covering Kafka and ClickHouse for real-time analytics. The audience was wonderfully engaged, which I really appreciated so soon after lunch.
The afternoon brought a brilliant deep dive into the Apache Gluten project from Chengcheng Jin and Binwei Yang. These guys are building something amazing—a plugin that accelerates many Apache Spark workloads and adds a huge number of new integrations. It was a privilege to share a slot with them.
The day’s final session was “The Evolution of DevRel – How we got here and what lies ahead” with John Coghlan. He had a room full of Dev Rels laughing at his spot-on slide about the three things Dev Rels always talk about: What do we call ourselves? Where do we report? How do we measure what we do? Beyond the inside-baseball humor, John shared valuable insights from his work at GitLab, particularly his model for stages of dev rel as they relate to stages of organization growth and profitability.
Between sessions, I had some great conversations. I ran into Kunal Kushwaha and we caught up about events in London and the joys of conference travel. Over coffee with Peter Zaitsev, we discussed databases, Kafka, and open source. The day rounded out perfectly with the social event and speakers dinner (massive thanks to CodeRabbit for hosting—it was wonderful to meet old friends and new).
Day Three: Going Out Strong
Despite the accumulated fatigue from two full days of conferencing and a few thousand miles of air travel, I made it to the morning keynotes and was glad I did. The lineup featured some exceptional speakers: Christian Heilmann delivered “X-rAI Specs, Submarines and Juice,” Angie Jones provided an insightful deep dive into how Block operationalized MCP at scale, taylor desseyn brought incredible energy with his talk on “Futureproofing Your Career With AI,” and Brian Douglas delivered a valuable session on “Finding Future Maintainers for open-source projects.”
I particularly wish I’d seen Zoe Steinkamp’s talk “Unbundling of the Cloud Data Warehouse” back when I was doing developer relations for Apache Druid. She did an amazing job breaking down the history of data warehousing and explaining key concepts like OLAP and data lake-houses.
“Fundamentals of DataOps: A Practitioner’s Guide” was a comprehensive journey into modern data ops. Lisa N. Cao’s extremely deep knowledge was immediately apparent, and I learned a huge amount about both data ops and how to effectively communicate about it.
Matthew Mullins walked us through the story of how he and his team built an impressive data product at Coginiti with DuckDB and Apache Iceberg in his talk “Data Management with Apache Iceberg and Mixed Compute.”
The conference ended on an unforgettable note with Paul Chin Jr.’s “Data Gone in 60 Seconds: A Serverless ETL Heist”—a Nicolas Cage-themed serverless talk that was absolutely incredible. He somehow had a room full of people shouting “Praise Cage” after three packed days of conference. Crazy stuff.
Final Thoughts
This was an awesome conference, and I can now see why so many of my friends were eager to recommend it. Todd Lewis and the organizing team are building the community they always wanted, and it’s worth the transatlantic trip to experience it. While I’m not sure if I can keep Todd’s pinky promise to come back next year given my current jet-lagged state, I’m definitely looking forward to being back in Raleigh with this wonderful community in the future.
A huge thank you to the All Things Open Conference team for putting on such a fantastic event. Now, onwards to London for Dremio Subsurface!