Eli Holderness
Eli is a developer, problem-finder and professional nerd who has been in tech since being released back into the wild from university. They’re currently working as a developer advocate at Scaleway, a European cloud provider, where they get to learn all sorts of weird things about how the internet works and then tell other people about them. In the past, they’ve worked in biotech, analog circuit design, and telecoms. They also speak regularly at conferences all over the world, including at NDC, PyCon UK and WeAreDevelopers World Congress.
Outside of work, they like to knit, hang out with their cat, and try to stop their cat from eating their knitting.
Session
For millennia, humans have known things. Pretty quickly, we started writing them down; our brains aren't very good at storing all the things we know reliably, and we needed something more durable.
A long time ago, this meant clay tablets with cuneiform on them, and things have only got more complicated from there. Nowadays, we try to store data so that computers can understand it too, and that's given us a bewildering array of options - portable hard drives, magnetic tape storage and so much more.
In this talk, we'll take a look at the history of data storage, and discuss why some methods have worked better than others. We'll talk about why writing things down for humans is different than doing it for computers, and why it's difficult to do both at the same time (this is what code is). Finally, we'll look at today's state-of-the-art for keeping data safe, and discuss what the future might hold.
This talk has no prerequisites, although a fondness for weird facts will help!