DC Systems is an independent tech talk series focused on systems programming here in DC and the broader DMV area.
We're focused on high quality talks and expert speakers. Talks about engineering, not product pitches.
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, robotic, etc.
- AI training, inference, compute orchestration
Previous talks are available here
Schedule
We meet on the second Tuesday of most months, but we sometimes take a break.
Our next meetup will be on 2026-09-08, and feature:
- Tom Barber on Killing the Cluster: Replacing Spark with Polars in a Pipeline That Ships to Places You Can't SSH Into
- Stephen Goguen on Why You Should Reinvent Enumerative Property-Based Testing
Archive
All our talks are recorded and available ou Youtube.
| Date | Speakers |
|---|---|
| August 11, 2026 | Nathan Chong from the AWS Automated Reasoning Group on how AWS proves the confidentiality of the Nitro Isolation Engine, and Justin Moore from Antithesis on data centers from the chips up. |
| July 14, 2026 | Jarred Nicholls on what all engineers can learn from HFT (High-Frequency Trading), and Samarth Kishor on static analysis as a proof tool. |
| June 9, 2026 | John Sutley on Retrocomputing On The Cheap: Reverse Engineering The Zon JR XL, and Mikail Khan on Summoning Control from the void in a Graph IR. |
| March 10, 2026 | Peter Tong on Optimal Real-Time Locking, and John Kastner on Clang's experimental bounds safety extension. |
| February 10, 2026 | PWL homage edition, with Aaron Eline on his favorite computer science paper. |
| Nov 11 | Yi Cai on Vest: a formally verified, efficient parser for binary formats, Gabe Parmer on the evolution of endpoint detection and response systems. |
| October 14 | Jacopo Tagliabue on speedrunning data lakehouses, Alperen Keles on the art of database testing. |
| September 9 | Amy Brown on Developing FPGAs with Amaranth and Pytest, Richard Hart with 33 hot takes on systems programming. |
| August 12 | Xiangpeng Hao on LiquidCache by InfluxData, Alex Pshenichkin on how to double your RAM. |
| July 8, 2025 | Liam DeVoe of HypoFuzz on strongly-typed property-based testing, José Trilla on lazy languages. |
| June 10, 2025 | Dan Slimmon from Hashicorp on queueing theory, Mike Rushanan of Harbor Labs on making medical devices secure-by-design. |
| May 13, 2025 | Rohan Padhye from CMU on controlled concurrency testing on the JVM, Harrison Goldstein from UMD on proof assistants |
| Mar 11, 2025 | Achille Roussel from Firetiger on faster parquet bloom filters, Sravan Balaji from Metron on Robotics |
| Feb 18, 2025 | Matt Butrovich from Apple on Apache DataFusion, Jayaprabhakar (JP) Kadarkarai from FizzBee on Formal Verification |
| Dec 10, 2024 | Shivansh Vij from Loophole Labs on VM migrations, Alperen Keleş from University of Maryland on Property-Based Testing, Paul Ryan from Antithesis on robustness |
| Nov 12, 2024 | Aaron Eline from AWS on randomized testing & formal verification, Tim Deeb-Swihart from Temporal on reliability |
| Oct 8, 2024 | Phil Eaton from EDB on distributed consensus, Andrei Matei from Data Ex Machina on dynamic instrumentation |
Sign up for mailing list to be notified of future meetups - Google Form.
Brought to you by
This talk series is organized by Aaron Eline, John Murray & tw lim. Antithesis has been gracious enough to host the events.