Velocity China

December 10, 2010 10:54 am | 10 Comments

I returned from Velocity China yesterday. It was a great, great conference. It sold out with ~600 people – the main ballroom was standing room only for the morning keynoters. One thing I noticed that’s different in China – people fill in the seats from the front back, whereas in the US people have to be encouraged to move up to the front.

There were 35 sessions. I invited several speakers from the U.S.:

• Changhao Jiang (Facebook) talked about some of the performance projects he’s worked on including BigPipe, Quickling, and PageCache. This was a great talk covering a lot of material. He was mobbed with questions afterward:
• David Wei (also from Facebook) did two talks. The first was about managing static resources – caching, combining scripts, etc. The second was about the challenges of setting up a performance practice and culture within an organization such as Facebook. This is a topic I get asked about frequently and we need a talk like this at Velocity US.
• Doug Crockford (Yahoo!) did two talks as well. His first was Using JavaScript Well – a focus on the good parts of JavaScript. The second talk was called There and Back Again – a much needed presentation about the potential of JavaScript running on the server.
• Daniel Hunt (also from Yahoo!) did a talk on the performance optimizations behind the Yahoo! Mail rewrite. This also talked about serverside JavaScript and their use of the mustache templating system.
• Alex Nicksay (YouTube) described four specific performance improvements made to YouTube. This talk was great because he included quantified load time results for each improvement. He also talked about their UIX widget system when should be open sourced soon. The slides contain almost all the code anyway.
• I did two talks. One was a variation of my Even Faster Web Sites presentation with some new slides talking about how script loading has changed dramatically in just the last few years. My other talk was about the arrival of the WPO industry. This is a new talk that includes my view of the main phases of building an industry-wide focus on performance.

A special treat that I was able to pull together at the last minute was presentations from the Chrome, IE9, and Firefox 4 teams. These browser talks are always popular at the Velocity US conference. Web developers understand that having fast browsers is critical to improving the user experience, and these browser teams have responded with tremendous focus on performance the last few years.

The other sessions were arranged by my co-chair Zhang Wen Song (Taobao). The presentations in the main ballroom were translated to English, and I also sat through presentations in Chinese. The translated talks were very good mostly focusing on the operations side of Velocity – availability, scaling, CDNs, and more. I had trouble following the talks that were only in Chinese although slides that had code or charts are universal. But I could tell these were good speakers – they were at ease up on stage, they engaged the audience, and their slides looked good.

Here’s some of the back story around how Velocity China happened: Velocity China is the first conference O’Reilly has done in China. And it sold out! A great start. We held it in Beijing since O’Reilly has an office there. But it’s not a very big office – just four employees headed up by Michelle Chen. This team of four people organized their first conference and pulled off a great event. Huge credit to Michelle and her team. I got to meet all them – Douglas, Donna, and Jian – they were incredible hosts taking us out to dinner every night and arranging drivers and tours.

O’Reilly partnered with Taobao on Velocity China. It was critical to have someone building up the conference program direction and content from China. The co-chair, Zhang Wen Song, arranged the program and also delivered a great opening keynote. Joshua Zhu, also from Taobao, helped with emceeing many of the Chinese sessions.

I want to thank O’Reilly and Taobao for making Velocity China happen. I also want to thank all the people I met there. I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the developers. Even with the language challenges, I had deep conversations during the breaks with attendees. There’s no doubt that performance is a big focus in China. With the success of this conference I’m confident we’ll be back again next year.