Velocity Wrap-up

June 26, 2008 10:51 am | 3 Comments

This week I co-chaired Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly. It was great! Jesse and I told the story about how the conference came about. When we proposed the conference we believed there was a community of performance and operations engineers that needed a forum to share and learn, and the attendance at Velocity confirmed this. Velocity sold out with over 600 attendees!

The lineup of speakers was great. There was a lot of material packed in a 2-day conference. I stayed in the Performance track, but wanted to attend every session in the Operations track, too. Many speakers shared their slides, and there are videos and photos from some of the talks.

Here were my favorite sessions. I recommend you checkout the slides.

• back-to-back demos of HTTPWatch, Fiddler, AOL PageTest, and Firebug
• Several talks about Firefox from Mike Connor and Internet Explorer from Eric Lawrence and Christian Stockwell (slides)
• Lessons Learned in Live Search Moving to and then Away from Ajax by Eric Schurman, Microsoft (slides)
• Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation by Scott Ruthfield (great speaker), WhitePages.com (slides, video)
• Improving Netflix Performance by Bill Scott, Netflix (slides)
• Hotmail’s Performance Tuning Best Practices by Aladdin Nassar, Microsoft (slides)
• High-performance Ajax Applications by Julien Lecomte, Yahoo (slides)
• Image Optimization: How Many of These 7 Mistakes Are You Making by Stoyan Stefanov, Yahoo (slides)

We’ve already started planning for Velocity 2009. Initial thoughts are to have more days at a bigger venue with more speakers. Start planning now on attending. Even better, start thinking about what you can share with our community to help make the Internet faster, more scalable, and more resilient with greater availability.