This is the 16th Perl Toolchain Summit. That number is remarkable in a way that’s easy to walk past — the Perl community has been gathering a small, focused group of toolchain maintainers in a room every single year since 2008, and the output has been disproportionate to the headcount. The Oslo Consensus in 2008 established how the CPAN toolchain would evolve. Lancaster in 2013 did the same for distribution metadata. Last year in Leipzig, the group shipped Test::CVE, prototyped MFA for PAUSE, cut Perl core runtime by 13%, and kept the next-generation CPAN client work moving forward.
maxSkew: 1 on a topologySpreadConstraints config looks like the obviously correct choice — maximum spread, tightest guarantee. We ran it that way in production until it caused a partial outage. Turns out maxSkew: 2 is almost always the safer default, and the difference only shows up in the failure case.
The phantom domain problem
With topologyKey: kubernetes.io/hostname and whenUnsatisfiable: DoNotSchedule, the Kubernetes scheduler counts every node registered in the API as a topology domain — including nodes that exist but can’t accept pods. A node that’s resource-exhausted but not tainted, or registered but not yet Ready, still participates in the skew calculation. Its count is 0.
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.