Elena Kolevska
Engineering Leader at Redis
Lisbon, Portugal
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Elena Kolevska is a hands-on engineering leader with deep roots in distributed systems and a long love affair with Redis. Fascinated by the human mind, she explores what it really means to build teams and technology resilient to entropy.
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No Pressure! Shipping Native Metrics Into a Library You Can't Break
The node-redis client library is downloaded over 10 million times a week. Until recently, it had no native observability, so when something went wrong between an app and Redis (latency, timeouts, connection churn) the client was invisible. Server metrics looked fine, but the app didn't.
This talk is about how we added OpenTelemetry metrics directly into the library. Not with a wrapper or monkey-patching, but by adding instrumentation that fits whatever OTel setup the app already has, and doesn't bother users who didn't ask for it.
We'll get into the blind spot that started it, the design decisions that made it trickier than it looked, a performance regression that forced us to rethink the whole model, and what we actually shipped to the community.
X-Raying Your Redis App: SDK Tuning with a Performance Engineer’s Eye
It’s common knowledge that Redis is lightning-fast, and while its SDKs come with solid default settings, fine-tuning them to your app’s unique needs can unlock even greater performance for caches, real-time updates, or pub/sub systems.
Join us, a Redis client library team lead and a performance engineer, in this 50-minute talk as we show you how to X-ray your Redis-powered apps with precise measurements to optimize performance. Starting with a simple app using default client library settings, we’ll reveal how misconfigurations can hurt speed. We’ll share how we design benchmarks to measure latency and throughput, offering a peek behind the curtains at how Redis experts think and where they hunt for bottlenecks. We’ll iteratively tweak SDK settings—connection pooling, pipelining, and more—measuring improvements and uncovering hidden issues at each step.
You’ll walk away with practical techniques to diagnose and tune your Redis apps, ensuring your leaderboards, session stores, or real-time features run at peak performance.
The Dapr Actors Journey: From Understanding to Intuition
The Actor model is a powerful yet abstract and often misunderstood concept in distributed systems, so let’s break it down and uncover its true potential. In this talk, I’ll guide you through the fundamentals of actors, share practical insights from our team’s experiences, and talk about common challenges developers face when working with Dapr Actors.
We’ll explore the most frequently asked questions: What are actors? How do they work? Where can they be effectively applied?
By the end of the session, you’ll have the confidence to integrate Dapr Actors and offload complex state management and concurrency concerns, allowing you to focus on building your application.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZyuO2dU9b0
The evolution of Redis cache eviction algorithms
This talk dives deep into the history of Redis cache eviction algorithms, uncovering how they evolved to meet the needs of modern systems. Through poring over old commits, commit messages, and design choices—we'll trace the introduction of new eviction algorithms and the ongoing optimization of existing ones.
With both technical insights and historical context, this session provides a rare glimpse into the craftsmanship behind Redis. Even the creator of Redis tweeted about this talk, calling it "true software archaeology"—a testament to the discoveries awaiting in this exploration of Redis’s internals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjq5XL2u3po
Bloom Filters: Redis’ Secret Sauce for Fast Membership Checks
Ever wonder how big companies can tell you in a split second that the username you’re trying to create already exists—or that someone else took it? Surely, they’re not checking against a database with hundreds of millions of usernames in real time... or are they? Enter the Bloom Filter—a clever data structure built for speed and scale, using a bit of probabilistic magic to make such feats possible.
In this talk, we’ll explore the inner workings of Bloom Filters, explaining their purpose through storytelling and a memorable analogy that will stay with you forever. Then, we’ll dive into how they’re implemented in Redis and solve real-world challenges at massive scale. This playful yet technical session is perfect for anyone curious about optimizing systems or exploring the secret sauce behind lightning-fast data checks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27lZKhiKiA
Elena Kolevska
Engineering Leader at Redis
Lisbon, Portugal
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