Momento had multiple team members give tech talks and workshops at QCon 2024.

Talks from the Momento team at QCon: 

Keynote

Dare mighty things: What Nasa’s bold endeavors teach us about the power of calculated RISCs

CEO and Co-Founder of Momento, Khawaja Shams, explored the essence of bold, calculated risks. He shared why taking risks is often safer than playing it safe, how to identify and mitigate potential downsides, and highlighted the characteristics of good risks. Khawaja also covered how to identify the risks that we take inadvertently and how being deliberate about those can change your outlook on being more innovative in your daily lives.

Track

Rust [in Production]

CTO and Co-Founder of Momento, Daniela Miao, hosted a series of speakers exploring the trade-offs involved in adopting Rust, considering its learning curve alongside the potential for infrastructure savings and a competitive edge for your engineering team. 

Speaking sessions 

Moving your bugs forward in time: Language trends that help you catch your bugs at build time instead of run time 

Chris Price, Software Engineer at Momento, talked through trends and strategies to prevent bugs from being deployed in production. As engineers grow, a key realization is the importance of code maintainability for long-term success. Structuring code to ensure teammates can easily contribute and catch bugs early is crucial, as fixing bugs at build time is far less costly than addressing them at runtime, which could lead to outages. Modern programming languages offer features like error handling with return values, immutable data structures, and exhaustive pattern matching to help move bug detection to build time. 

Myth busters: Is Rust a slam dunk? 

Ramya, Krishnamoorthy, Principal Engineer at Momento, shared the journey of how Momento built a high-scale caching service on Kotlin, but then rewrote the service in Rust. Ramya shared how Momento navigated the development process with a team of varying levels of Rust expertise from novices to experts alongside an incredible Rust community. 

Workshops

A little Rust-Y: Using Rust Intertop to boost performance of existing apps (in any language) 

Anita Ruangrotsakun and Chris Price, Software Engineers at Momento, hosted a hands-on workshop that displayed how adding a bit of Rust can dramatically boost the performance of your Node.JS Lambda—without rewriting your entire app. 

This workshop helped attendees pinpoint the performance bottlenecks in their Lambda, they learned Rust basics and how to seamlessly integrate it with Nod.JS, they discovered how to replace expensive code with a fast Rust function, and witnessed the cost and speed improvements firsthand. intermediate, you’ll have the flexibility to explore optimizations or advanced features.

Khawaja Shams Co-Founder & CEO, Momento

Keynote Speaker

Khawaja is the CEO and Co-Founder of Momento. He is passionate about investing in people, setting a bold vision, and team execution. Khawaja has experience at AWS where he owned DynamoDB, and subsequently owned product and engineering for all 7 of the AWS Media Services. He was awarded the prestigious NASA Early Career Medal for his contributions to the Mars Rovers.

Daniela Miao Co-Founder & CTO, Momento

Track Host

Daniela Miao is the Co-Founder of Momento, where she’s humbled everyday by her awesome teammates! Previously, she led Platform Engineering at Lightstep, where she launched their new Metrics Product. She was also tech lead at AWS DynamoDB, and released cross-region replication. Daniela has spoken at many events including re:Invent, QCon, and Kubecon. At Momento, she works on distributed system performance, observability, security, and the intersection of engineering with business.

Chris Price Software Engineer, Momento

Speaker & Workshop Host

Chris was previously a software engineer at Momento who hails from Portland, OR. When not gardening or riding bikes, he enjoys analyzing and improving software performance and geeking out over metrics. He has technical leadership experience at companies of various shapes and sizes, from tiny startups to AWS. He passionately worked to improve the productivity and happiness of all engineers who have ever experienced the joys of building and operating a cache cluster, by contributing to Momento’s platform.

Ramya Krishnamoorthy Principal Engineer, Momento

Speaker

Ramya is an Engineering Leader at Momento where she works on the next generation of serverless low latency data services like caching and message buses. Previously at AWS, she led the Container Observability team for ECS and launched AWS Elemental MediaPackage, a cloud video packaging and content origination service used to stream events like the Super Bowl and Thursday Night Football to millions of viewers. She worked on critical low latency financial trading and derivatives pricing platforms at Bloomberg. Ramya brings close to two decades of distributed systems experience in multiple domains to the table and has seen the evolution of applications from monoliths to microservices across languages and frameworks. In her first startup gig @Momento, she appreciates the deeper interactions with customers to understand how technology solves their problems. Outside of work, she likes to catch up with the latest in science fiction and fantasy books or try out new recipes.

Anita Ruangrotsakun Software Engineer, Momento

Workshop Host

Anita is a software engineer on the Developer Ecosystem team at Momento, working to provide an excellent developer experience and help people build serverless applications. When she’s not working, Anita enjoys reading, building dynasties in the Sims 3, and finding new foodie spots in the PNW.