SpeedGeeks LA at Shopzilla

October 27, 2009 9:54 pm | 4 Comments

I co-hosted a great web performance meetup yesterday called SpeedGeeks LA. The idea started when Phil Dixon invited me down to Shopzilla to give a talk. (Phil and I have stayed in touch after his amazing session at Velocity 2009.) Phil suggested we invite some other performance-minded companies in the area, and then we started talking about expanding it to include more speakers. We ended up with over 3 hours of presentations and nearly 150 people.

We had a great mix of talks (I hope to post all slides soon):

  • In Search of Speed – I kicked it off talking about the importance of progressive enhancement as an enabler of progressive rendering. (slides)
  • You Get What You Measure – A reprise of Phil’s talk from Velocity that includes the oft-cited stats about a 7-12% increase in revenue and 50% drop in server load thanks to faster performance.
  • A Holistic Approach to Building a High Performance Web Site – Paddy Hannon (Edmunds) – A no-nonsense approach to instilling performance into the development process.
  • Latency Improvements for PicasaWeb – Gavin Doughtie (Google) – Great tips from a web guru about what makes PicasaWeb fast.
  • Performance-as-a-service – Morten Begai (Heroku) – Performance built-in to their Rails hosting environment.
  • MSFast – Jeremy Custenborder, Yadid Ramot (MySpace) – Demo of MSFast plus a preview of what looks to be an awesome Flash profiler. Watch for it!
  • Trace Down JavaScript & AJAX Performance in IE – Andreas Grabner (dynaTrace) – Check out their new dynaTrace Ajax Edition tool.
  • Application Architecture Determines Application Performance – Randy Stafford (Oracle) – A reminder that sometimes you need to focus on backend performance, too.

Oracle was kind enough to sponsor lunch for everyone and raffle off a Wii. How awesome is that?!

A huge shoutout to Phil and the folks at Shopzilla, especially Lauren Moser. They hosted everyone at their headquarters and even handed out swag bags. The space was setup perfectly, with room for folks to group into smaller conversations during breaks. Just a top notch operation on all fronts.

I’m calling this the inaugural event for SpeedGeeks. My hope is that LA is just the first of many cities where SpeedGeeks gather to share knowledge about make the web faster. I’d like to see SpeedGeeks expand in a similar way as how Ignite events take place worldwide. If you’d like to pull together such an event in your city, contact me and we can brainstorm. I can rally performance gurus in the area and, who knows, I might even be able to drop-in and help co-host.

SpeedGeeks of the world unite!

4 Responses to SpeedGeeks LA at Shopzilla

  1. Gavin Doughtie | 28-Oct-09 at 8:14 am | Permalink |

    Thanks for having me, that was fun and I learned a lot.

  2. JP | 28-Oct-09 at 10:49 am | Permalink |

    I was wondering if the slides of the talks are going to be posted online? (besides yours which is already)

    I’d love to see such event in San Francisco :) (well Velocity is not that far – but it’s a bigger event ;).

    Thanks for sharing Steve. Just finished the EFWS book. It was a great read.

  3. Sergey Chernyshev | 28-Oct-09 at 11:32 am | Permalink |

    It’s great to see another local performance group created!

    First was actually started in May in New York City although it’s not called SpeedGeeks, obviously, but New York Web Performance Group:
    http://www.meetup.com/Web-Performance-NY/

    I hope this will become tradition all over the country where we don’t have to wait for Velocity and can discuss issues locally.

    We actually have one session today about MySQL Performance patches by Morgan Tocker of Percona and one on November 17th at Meetup.com when their team is going to talk about their performance experience both on front-end and back-end.

    Sergey
    Organizer, NY Web Performance Group

  4. Sergey Chernyshev | 29-Oct-09 at 8:07 am | Permalink |

    BTW, Steve, will you be uploading your presentation to SlideShare?

    I’ve posted it to TechPresentations: http://www.techpresentations.org/In_Search_of_Speed but projecting slides right on the page is always better.