RIP Usenix ATC

USENIX made the decision this week to
discontinue its flagship
Annual Technical Conference. When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the
Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to
formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I
came up lionizing ATC: I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, and
programs like the
USENIX
Summer 1994 conference felt like Renaissance-era Florence for systems
practitioners.

When we developed DTrace in the early 2000s, we knew that there was no better
venue to announce it to the world than USENIX ATC. We put a lot of effort
into the resulting paper,
Dynamic
Instrumentation of Production Systems — and I was elated when it was
accepted for USENIX ATC 2004.

The conference itself was…​ surprising. This was not the USENIX of a decade
prior; the conference was decidedly academic, and in the strictest sense: all
of the presentations were from PhD students seeking out academic work. I
wrote about this (with characteristic bluntness?) after I returned from the
conference, asking
whither USENIX? This
blog post engendered quite a bit of discussion (the bygone era of meaningful
discourse in blog comments!) — and an especially thoughtful long-form
response
from Werner Vogels.

Werner’s thoughts in turn inspired
my own
response, where I in particular looked at the Program Committee formulation — and became alarmed by the total collapse in industrial participation. Ted
Leung
noted
this, and referred us to Rob Pike’s
infamous polemic. I wrote again on this later that summer (those halcyon
days immediately before the delightful distraction of a newborn!), asking
whither
systems research?

The summer of 2004 was a long time ago; the occasion of ATC’s discontinuance
affords us the opportunity to look back on all of this now two decades on.

First, on systems research, it is ironic (or perhaps it isn’t?) that Pike
decried the lack of new systems — but one of his own creation,
the Go programming
language — became indisputably one of the most important system software
developments of the 2010s. Go is not alone, of course: that decade also
brought us the Rust
programming language, a language that
I fell so
in love with that
we
named our company after it.

What happened here? As in so many other dimensions, I think our discussion
and consternation in 2004 plainly underestimated the importance and impact of
open source. Go and Rust do not arise — cannot arise — in a proprietary
world. These are also not the work of hobbyists: they were written by
professionals for professionals in a professional capacity. And of course, it
isn’t just languages: in all manners of systems software, the leading edge of
innovation is in deployed, production, open source systems. Open source
systems are not without
their own complexity and conflict, of course — viz. the recent
shoot-out
at the CNCF corral — but these are literal sideshows: in the last two decades
new, innovative, production-oriented systems have thrived (whether
we call those systems “research” or not). Importantly, the vector for
publishing for the practitioner is via repositories rather than
being confined to only formal writing.

Second, as for USENIX ATC itself, the conference itself plainly struggled.
The problems that I had seen with respect to an overly academic conference
seemingly metastasized, and for me, the conference drifted further and further
from the shores of practitioner relevance. (For practitioners seeking to
formally publish, I recommended that they instead target Communications of
the ACM via
its
practitioner-focused content.)

Seemingly unaware of my own ambivalence about the conference, however, USENIX
asked me to return in 2016 to give the ATC keynote. With the caution that
some
found my presentation offensive, my keynote,
A Wardrobe for the Emperor,
outlined my belief that computer science had erred grievously in insisting
upon conferences (rather than journals) as a publishing vehicle — and that
USENIX and its conferences had been a casualty. And while my keynote may have
been particularly candid, I am not the only one who saw this: Rik Farrow wrote
up an
excellent
piece on my talk for ;login: giving context that I was unaware of — namely
that inside of USENIX, this was an issue of concern reaching back decades. So
USENIX ATC did finally succumb, and I do view it as a casualty here,
asphyxiated by the rough love of academic computer science and its inability
to grow beyond the conference model of publishing.

That said, while ATC may have died in the arms of academia, it would be unfair
to say that academia alone killed it:
as Adam
and I discussed with Stephen O’Grady, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick and Theo
Schlossnagle, conferences are hard — and in-person conferences are
especially so. While they certainly lose something in the process,
it feels like online conferences give us indisputably (overwhelmingly!) more
bang for the buck; it felt like some
decline of USENIX’s in-person conference model was inevitable. This is not to
say that in-person models are impossible, of course, just that they needed
to look different.
(Selfishly, I wish USENIX had developed
conferences like the
Systems
We Love event that we ran in 2016 — selfish because I’d much rather attend
than organize!)

On ATC, I think we can fairly grieve what we lost: ATC was — at its height — a singular forum for presenting pioneering systems work. And even as it
declined in attendance, it retained this spirit in its best works. Certainly,
I view our own work at ATC in 2004 as striving to be in this tradition — and I think
that it’s apt and fitting that last year’s Best Paper (which will stand as the
penultimate USENIX ATC Best Paper) is on
a system to validate AI
infrastructure at scale, deployed on a real, production system, reporting
results that are relevant to the practitioner.

So RIP, USENIX ATC. I know we had a complicated relationship over the years,
but it was a good run. Thank you to everyone at USENIX who gave us an
important forum for some of our biggest and boldest ideas — and we’ll always
have the summer of 1994.