Back to blogging after Velocity

July 2, 2010 12:04 pm | 3 Comments

The last few weeks have been hectic. I was in London and Paris for 10 days. I returned a day before Velocity started. Most of you experienced or have heard about the awesomeness that was Velocity – great speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Right after Velocity I headed up to Foo Camp at O’Reilly HQ. This week I’ve been catching up on all the email that accumulated over three weeks.

During this time blogging has taken a backseat. But now that my head is above water I want to start relaying some of the key takeaways from Velocity. I wrote my Velocity wrap-up and mentioned my favorite sessions. But here are the top 10 sessions based on the attendee ratings:

1. Choose Your Own Adventure by Adam Jacob, Opscode (unofficial video snippets)
2. TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance by John Rauser, Amazon (slides)
3. The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS by Nicole Sullivan, consultant and Stoyan Stefanov, Yahoo! (video)
4. Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage by Nicholas Zakas, Yahoo! (slides)
5. Hidden Scalability Gotchas in Memcached and Friends by Neil Gunther Performance Dynamics and Shanti Subramanyam and Stefan Parvu, Oracle (video)
6. Internet Explorer 9 by Jason Weber, Microsoft (slides)
7. Creating Cultural Change by John Rauser, Amazon (video)
8. Scalable Internet Architectures by Theo Schlossnagle, OmniTI (slides)
9. The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster Into an Opportunity by Lenny Rachitsky, Webmetrics/Neustar (video, slides)
10. Tied for #10:
    1. Metrics 101: What to Measure on Your Website by Sean Power, Watching Websites (slides)
    2. The 90-Minute Optimization Life Cycle: Fast by Default Before Our Eyes? by Joshua Bixby and Hooman Beheshti, Strangeloop Networks
    3. Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques by Anne Sullivan, Google (slides)
    4. Chrome Fast. by Mike Belshe, Google (slides)

Some things to highlight: Adam Jacob is an incredible speaker – insightful and funny. John Rauser is the speaker I enjoyed the most – he shows up twice at #2 and #7. Two of the browser presentations registered. The workshops this year were incredible and very well attended – four of them registered in the top 10 (#8, #10a, #10b, and #10c). Annie Sullivan rated high and it was her first time speaking at a conference.

The last two years at Velocity we’ve only been able to videotape the talks in one room, so this year that means about a third of the talks were videotaped. Four of these top rated sessions were taped. Next year I’ll try to get more of the top speakers in the video room. I’ve asked the five speakers without slides to upload them to the Velocity web site. Check back next week if you want those.

I actually feel electricity running up and down my spine looking over these talks. To think I had something to do with pulling these gurus together and offering a place for them to share what they know – it’s humbling and exhilarating at the same time. I’ll be doing some more Velocity-related posts on specific sessions next week, so stay tuned.