Racklabs - Thoughts on the Hosted IT Revolution

Rackspace Developers Conference 2008

Our first developer conference was held over the last couple of days and came to a close Friday afternoon. I’ll go ahead and declare it a success based on all the feedback I received from attendees. RackLabs and Mailtrust sponsored the event, but we had software developers from every corner of the company in attendance. In fact, we invited everyone at Rackspace who actively writes code as a part of their job and even some of the Rackers who just work closely with those developers.

We began planning this event early this year when a few of us were talking about how many developers we must have at Rackspace by now and how few of them likely know what one another is working on. We’re a bit spread out now with office locations in Texas, Virginia, and London and it makes it hard to keep up with what other teams are working on. So we decided to fix that…

Our dev conference was designed to bring all the Rack developers we could together in one place to expose them to some new technologies, to share ideas, and to meet a few new people or at least put names with faces. We decided to hold it in San Antonio because we could get the highest attendance here, so we flew in a bunch of the guys at Mailtrust down from Blacksburg. We thought about holding the conference at Rackspace HQ, but to cut down on distractions we needed to get offsite. We ended up renting out the old Southern Pacific Railroad Depot in downtown San Antonio. Nowadays it’s called Sunset Station, but it’s a historic building built back in 1902 and has a great atmosphere. We had lunch both days nearby in an old church.. What a cool venue. Lanham Napier, our CEO, came down and talked to the group on the first day and pointed out something pretty remarkable…back in 2000 we had the Rackspace holiday party at Sunset Station and today there are more developers at Rackspace than there were total employees back then. Crazy.

Our conference revolved around a series of technical talks delivered by Racker developers about various technologies used at Rackspace, Mosso, or Mailtrust. We even talked about a few technologies that we don’t use…yet! Here are a few of topics just to give you a little flavor:

• HA and Scalability @ Mailtrust
• MapReduce
• Botnets Gone Wild, Real Botnets, Real Wild
• Trends in Concurrent Programming
• Intro to PostgreSQL
• Asynchronous, event-driven programming with Twisted Python
• and many more…

We also had several “demo” booths set up to allow Rackers to demonstrate the technology they were working on and give others a chance to see it up close. One of the demo booths showed off our new cloud storage platform called CloudFS. Also demo’d was some of the cool technology we’ve built for integrating and scaling the immense monitoring infrastructure at Rackspace. Very cool stuff indeed.

It was exciting to see so many Rackspace developers in one place at one time and to hear about all the cool stuff they’re working on and thinking about. We’re planning on doing it again and may even invite some customers next time around. Stay tuned.

If you’re interested in joining Rackspace and working on some very challenging projects, we’re looking for good Python and Java developers. It’s getting interesting around here, so now is the time to join!
Here are some photos from our conference:

Our T-shirts. The front says /[RH]ACKER/

The place where we held the conference.

My “keynote” slides.

Bill Boebel, CTO @ Mailtrust

The old church where we had lunch.

A shot of the conference.

Some of the RackLabs guys at lunch. Eric, Jay, and Jay.