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Anchor’s talk went pretty well by all reports, huzzah!

Actually, it wouldn’t be fair to say it was that easy, so I’ll let the cat out of the bag on this one:

Panel 1

T-Rex: Our talk to linux.conf.au got accepted!

Panel 2

{Close-up of T-Rex’s face, he is visibly excited}
T-Rex: It will be AWESOME

Panel 3

{Zoom out to show T-Rex and Dromiceiomimus. T-Rex is about to confidently stomp a tiny house}
Dromiceiomimus: You’ve prepared the talk months in advance, right?
T-Rex: 1337 speakers such as myself need no such preparation!

Panel 4

{Utahraptor replaces Dromiceiomimus in shot, verbally catching T-Rex just as he is about to stomp a tiny woman}
Utahraptor: But what about the slides?

Panel 5

{Now some distance apart, T-Rex and Utahraptor look directly at each other, in tense silence}

Panel 6

T-Rex: Oh uni placement dude?! Can I ask you a favor???

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I kid, I kid – they did make the slides themselves, all of them. No uni students were harmed or exploited in the making of this talk.

To wrap up, one talk that covered a topic that doesn’t get much loving was Moving Day: Migrating Big Data from A to B. Mozilla had more than 40TB of data in their crash-reporting system, which demands near 100% uptime, and needed to move it all to a new datacentre – not something to be cowboyed the morning after an all-night bender.

Rigorous planning, automation and testing ensured that everything went smoothly; this talk instilled an idea of how to approach such a mammoth project with confidence.

This is something we handled when Github moved to Rackspace, but Mozilla also added a “post-mortem” phase – even if everything goes well (it did), there are lessons to be learnt from the experience, which stands you in good stead for the next time.