Vancouver systems is an independent talk series focused on systems programming.
We are focused on high quality talks and expert speakers here in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
"Systems programming is a way of modelling software development. It's not about a category of what you are working on, it's a way of looking at the problem. An excellent systems programmer fully understands the systems involved. " - Andrew Kelley
We fully believe that you can be an excellent systems programmer while working on anything. Speakers will share their experience building, testing, debugging, and maintaining:
- Compilers, parsers, virtual machines, IDEs, profiling, etc.
- Databases, storage, networking, distributed systems
- Large scale infrastructure, low latency, high availability services
- Formal methods, verification
- Browsers, kernel development, security, etc.
- Algorithms, data structures, performance optimizations, HPC
- Operating Systems / kernels
- Embedded systems, IoT, robotics, etc.
- Machine learning training, inference, compute orchestration
- Many other things..
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Schedule
| Date & Location | TL;DR |
|---|---|
|
February 24th 2026, 6pm Gastown Signup |
Reliability at scale - Diving into the TiDB SQL Optimizer
Many databases are pivoting to how to address scalability as workloads are dominated by AI agents rather than human developers or ORM generated applications. And while distributed SQL databases such as TiDB handle the scale of the system, the reliability of the application becomes equally as critical. This session delves into why query optimizers struggle to deliver reliable SQL performance, and how TiDB is solving this to be more adaptable given less predictable workloads. Terry Purcell is the Chief Optimizer Architect at PingCAP, leading the development of the TiDB query optimizer. He has over two decades of experience in query optimization, including 10 years leading one of the most reliable cost-based optimizers in the industry. Terry has contributed to more than 40 US patents, as well as countless webinars, white papers, articles, and conference presentations. *** CHERI is a set of architectural concepts and mechanisms that add capabilities as a fundamental primitive for memory access. You may have heard it described as “hardware-backed memory safety.” But neither description is all that satisfying. Does CHERI make my C code memory safe? What is memory safety, exactly? And if my codebase is already written in a safe language, why should I care? Milo Piccini Noble is a 4(+1)th year undergraduate student at UBC, and a contributor to the CHERIoT project, where he's extending the shared heap allocator. Milo's interests span security, languages, systems, and developer tools: really, how we can build software that doesn't break in terrible ways. He has a lot to learn. *** CUDA over TCP - how we reverse engineered the CUDA API to allow us to run CUDA workloads in environments where there is no physical GPU. A live demo would include running a large open source LLM model on a MacBook! Shivansh is a long-time open-source developer who started his infrastructure journey back in 2018 at IBM where his work centered around various container and Kubernetes platforms. He was also actively involved in the early days of service meshes, and today his goal with Loophole Labs is to finally fix the core infrastructure problems that plague the industry. This event is sponsored by TiDB and Antithesis. |
| March 10th 2025 | Carl Sverre ("Granular transactions on object storage") and by Nisan Haramati ("The Physical Properties of Data and the Limits of Scaling") |
| Nov 21st 2024 | Morgan Gallant (turbopuffer) and Kir Shatrov (Shopify) |
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This series is organized by Cameron Morgan and Kir Shatrov.
Inspired by: