Not to shamelessly plug but if you're in the Bay Area on June 28, we're giving a talk that's a bit about performance, a bit about Netflix engineering culture: https://jstalks2018.splashthat.com/.
If I’m a student can I sign up to attend?
Sure! (at least I don't see why you wouldn't be able to)
Exactly. They had engineers dedicated to creating an open source latency/fault tolerance library called Hystrix. Not too surprising they’re dedicating resources to other projects, too.