Kubernetes

The schedule I built two weeks ago was a fiction. A useful fiction — it forced real thinking about tradeoffs — but eighteen of the sessions I marked as “MUST” or “HIGH” are now links in a YouTube folder I won’t open before 2027. The one session that wasn’t on any schedule, wasn’t announced publicly, and had no recording? That one I can still reconstruct line by line. That’s the gap between the conference you plan and the conference you actually attend.

There are 277 sessions at SCALE 23x this year. I know this because I extracted all of them from the schedule webarchive files and scored every single one. I’m not proud of how long this took. But it surfaced some genuinely interesting tradeoffs — and the pattern of what conflicted with what tells you something real about where platform engineering is right now. The scheduling problem is different when you manage a team # When I was an IC, conference scheduling was mostly about depth. Find the three talks that will blow your mind and plan the rest around them. Everything else is hallway track.