O'Reilly Conferences: Velocity

News Release: O'Reilly Velocity Conference Gathers Web Performance and Operations Experts

Jackie Hadley, Communications Associate — 2009-07-21T08:24:51-08:00

Top Experts in Web Performance and Operations Draw High Turnout
O’Reilly Velocity Conference Shows How to Achieve Website Speed and Reliability

Sebastopol, CA, July 16, 2009—The second year of the O'’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference drew more than 700 web developers and experts, a larger group than attended last year’s, to San Jose June 22-24, 2009. They came to Velocity to pose their toughest questions to the people doing the best performance and operations work in the world.

“The fact that attendance has surpassed last year says something about the growing importance of this new field,” said O’Reilly Media founder and CEO, Tim O’Reilly.

Conference co-chairs Steve Souders of Google and Jesse Robbins of OpsCode and O’Reilly Radar designed the three-day conference with dedicated tracks for both web performance and web operations. Among nearly 80 speakers were some of the most innovative minds at industry-leading companies.

Read the full press release.

Mozilla, GoGrid, Google Speakers Slated for Velocity

Suzanne Axtell — 2009-05-22T13:39:25-08:00

The second edition of Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference from O’Reilly, is just about four weeks away. Program co-chairs Jesse Robbins (recently named Geek of the Week by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and Steve Souders are putting the final touches on the program; new speakers just confirmed include:

Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer of Mozilla will delve into developer tools used to enhance web performance in their presentation, On Responsiveness
Randy Bias, Technology Strategy VP at GoGrid, will chart the tactical and strategic vision around the technology for the GoGrid cloud computing platform
In Go with the Reflow, Google’s Lindsey Simon will present some findings from testing reflow times in a variety of browsers under different conditions

For another peek into what’s in store at Velocity, be sure to read James Turner’s interview with Microsoft’s Eric Schurman, The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number.

Early Registration Savings and Free Hotel Night Contest Deadline

Suzanne Axtell — 2009-04-20T17:13:07-08:00

Everyone who registers for Velocity by May 3 not only saves up to $150, but is also entered to win one free night at The Fairmont (during Velocity conference dates only).

The downturn is no time for downtime. If you are tasked with building faster sites, designing scalable infrastructure, and delivering a superior, always-available customer experience, Velocity is the single best place to go for crucial skills and knowledge.

Whether you work for a top-flight company or are a freelance rock star, Velocity addresses the tangibles and intangibles you are already taking into consideration when planning your conference budget for this year, from ROI, tools, and techniques to networking with experts and sharpening marketable job skills.

Just a few of the top practitioners you’ll hear from include:

Dave Artz (AOL), The Secret Weapons of teh AOL Optimization Team
Brad Chen (Google), Native CPU Performance in the Browser with Google Native Client
Alan Kasindorf (Six Apart), Load Balanced Roundup
Yaron Friedman (Google), High Performance Search at Google
Eric Mattingly (Microsoft), Creating Instant Response Time Predictions with neXpert
Aladdin Nassar (Microsoft/Hotmail), Performance-Based Design: Linking Performance to Business Metrics
Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent) & Sean Power (Akoha), What the Rest of the Company Knows About Your Website
Theo Schlossnagle (OmniTI), Scalable Internet Architectures
Tenni Theurer (Yahoo!), Coding for Greener Applications: Style Makes a Difference

If you’re planning to attend, we encourage you to book a room now at The Fairmont San Jose to put yourself close to the action and increase your opportunities the conversations and revelations happen between attendees after the session are done for the day.

Zawodny, Walls, Scott Headline Velocity Conference

Suzanne Axtell — 2009-03-07T09:30:01-08:00

Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have just unveiled the schedule for the second edition of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference. Building on the very successful premiere of the event last year, Velocity will feature some of the most talented experts in the business, giving all participants the skills and knowledge they need to raise their game and beef up the bottom line–critical functions in this down economy.

A sampling of the speakers and topics on the agenda include:

Luke Kanies (Reductive Labs), Introduction to Managed Infrastructure with Puppet
Mandi Walls (AOL), Migrating www.aol.com from a Proprietary Web Platform to Open Source
John Allspaw and Paul Hammond (Flickr), 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr
Bill Scott (Netflix), Event Delegation: Speeding Up the Netflix Queue
Douglas Crockford (Yahoo!), Ajax Performance
Richard Campbell (Strangeloop Networks), Death of a Web Server: Crisis in Caching
Jeremy Zawodny (Craigslist), MySQL Performance from Day #1
John Adams (Twitter), Fixing Twitter: Improving Its Performance and Scalability
Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo!), YSlow 2.0
Robert Johnson (Facebook), High Performance at Massive Scale - Lessons Learned at Facebook
Nicole Sullivan, Nine Ways Engineering and Design Come Together to Make Your Site Slow
Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!), Writing Efficient JavaScript

New to Velocity 2009 is a full day of workshops, which will immerse participants more deeply into essential issues for making websites fast, scalable, efficient, and available.

Registration is also open; the early registration discount ends May 4.

News Release: O'Reilly Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference, Opens Registration

Jackie Hadley, Communications Associate — 2009-03-06T09:56:09-08:00

Program Teaches How to Build a Better Internet

Sebastopol, CA, March 5, 2009—O’Reilly Media has opened early registration for Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have revealed the program for this three-day event dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures. Early registration savings of up to $300 end May 3, 2009.

Velocity provides the place to learn how to build websites and services that raise the standards for fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable performance. Velocity 2009 focuses on accomplishing more with fewer resources, efficient design and scaling techniques, and the best ways to manage change. The program also highlights best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line.

Read the full press release.

Last Day to Submit a Talk for Velocity

Suzanne Axtell — 2009-01-12T09:22:46-08:00

11:59 p.m. Jan. 12 is the deadline to submit speaking proposals for Velocity, the O’Reilly conference on web performance and operations. The program committee is interested in presentations for a variety of skill levels around the following topics:

How to tie web performance and operations to the bottom line
Real-world incident management - getting “tight like a pit crew”
Making websites as fast and reliable as desktop apps
Networking, DNS, and load balancing
Profiling’s not just on the backend: JavaScript, CSS, and the network
Managing web services - flaming disasters you survived and lessons learned
The intersection between performance and design
Wicked cool (and actionable) metrics
Ads, ads, ads - the performance killer?
Troubleshooting in production
How to scale and be fast on the social web
Capacity planning and load testing
Establishing performance and operations best practices within your organization
Configuration management best (and worst) tools and practices
Monitoring and instrumentation: Open Source, as a service, commercially supported solutions
Using multiple CDNs to improve customer experience and reduce cost

A limited number of speaking opportunities are also available through conference sponsorship. Contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com for more information.

News Release: Infrastructure Meets Inspiration at Velocity 2009

Jackie Hadley, Communications Associate — 2008-11-19T11:10:31-08:00

O’Reilly Conference Opens Call for Participation

Sebastopol, CA, November 17—Want to make your websites fast, scalable, efficient, and reliable? O’Reilly’s Velocity, the Web Performance and Operations Conference on June 22-24, 2009, at the Fairmont in San Jose, CA, shows how to develop those traits. Dedicated to helping people build better infrastructures, Velocity offers developers and engineers the key for crossing over from cool Web 2.0 features to sustainable websites. Program chairs Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders have opened the call for participation and invite proposals for conference sessions, panels, and a newly added full day of tutorials at Velocity 2009.

“Velocity pulls together industry leaders covering the most important areas of web performance and operations. I’m looking forward to discussing how to get the most out of the latest browsers including Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Safari 4, and Chrome. The competition is really strong in this area, especially with regard to JavaScript performance,” says Steve. “Another theme we’re highlighting is best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company’s bottom line. These are the best kind of win-win optimizations that everyone can rally behind.”

Read full press release.

Best of Velocity '08: Web Ops

Jackie Hadley, Communications Associate — 2008-10-20T13:53:53-08:00

Harish Mallipeddi’s Blog: Commenting on Velocity ‘08

I finally had time tonight to look at the presentations from Velocity 08. If you’re interested, they’re all available on the Oreilly conference website.

Personally I thought the following two talks were awesome:

* Capacity Management by John Allspaw (Flickr Ops Mgr)

* Building an Automated Infrastructure by Adam Jacob

BusinessWeek: Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-07-08T17:22:15-08:00

Jesse Robbin’s experiences as an emergency responder at Hurricane Katrina introduce this piece on mapping tools designed for use during disasters.

New York Times: As Web Traffic Grows, Crashes Take Bigger Toll

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-07-08T17:05:43-08:00

“When these sites go away, it’s a sudden loss. It’s like you are standing in the middle of Macy’s and the power goes out. When the thing you depend on to live your daily life suddenly goes away, it’s trauma…These companies have a responsibility to people who rely and depend on them, just as people going over a public bridge expect that the bridge won’t suddenly collapse,” says Velocity cochair Jesse Robbins in Brad Stone’s article on Web sites’ performance.

Apple Universe:Velocity Highlights

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-06-24T15:31:53-08:00

Teen blogger Daniel Brusilovsky used his first conference media pass to produce great coverage of the introduction of CloudStatus, learn about Device Anywhere, and for some live blogging of the conference’s opening hours.

Slashdot: Huge Traffic On Wikipedia's Non-Profit Budget

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-06-24T14:42:56-08:00

“Domas Mituzas of MySQL/Sun gave a presentation Monday at the Velocity conference that provided an inside look at the technology behind Wikipedia, which he calls an ‘operations underdog,’” writes Rich Miller.

CNet: Google: Server Efficiency Needs New RECIPE

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-06-23T17:51:14-08:00

Stephen Shankland on Google engineer Luis Barroso’s discussion of models servers can use to increase efficiency by lowering power consumption.

Data Center Knowledge:CloudStatus Monitors Amazon's Cloud

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-06-23T16:17:42-08:00

Rich Miller covers another major announcement from Velocity.

Data Center Knowledge: Cassatt: Power Down for Energy Savings

Maureen Jennings, Conferences Publicist — 2008-06-23T16:13:29-08:00

Rich Miller reports on Bill Coleman’s Velocity keynote, “Sometimes the path to a greener data center happens in small steps that appear obvious but often are left undone.”