Velocity highlights (video bonus!)

July 28, 2014 11:08 pm | Comments Off on Velocity highlights (video bonus!)

We’re in the quiet period between Velocity Santa Clara and Velocity New York. It’s a good time to look back at what we saw and look forward to what we’ll see this September 15-17 in NYC.

Velocity Santa Clara was our biggest show to date. There was more activity across the attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors than I’d experienced at any previous Velocity. A primary measure of Velocity is the quality of the speakers. As always, the keynotes were livestreamed. The people who tuned in were not disappointed. I recommend reviewing all of the keynotes from the Velocity YouTube Playlist. All of them were great, but here were some of my favorites:

Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler – Start. Here. Scott Hanselman’s walk through the evolution of the Web and cloud computing is informative and hilarious.
Lowering the Barrier to Programming – Pamela Fox works on the computer programming curriculum at Khan Academy. She also devotes time to Girl Develop It. This puts her in a good position to speak about the growing gap between the number of programmers and the number of programmer jobs, and how bringing more diversity into programming is necessary to close this gap.
Achieving Rapid Response Times in Large Online Services – Jeff Dean, Senior Fellow at Google, shares amazing techniques developed at Google for fast, scalable web services.
Mobile Web at Etsy – People who know Lara Swanson know the incredible work she’s done at Etsy building out their mobile platform. But it’s not all about technology. For a company to be successful it’s important to get cultural buy-in. Lara explains how Etsy achieved both the cultural and technical advances to tackle the challenges of mobile.
Build on a Bedrock of Failure – I want to end with this motivational cross-disciplinary talk from skateboarding icon Rodney Mullen. When you’re on the bleeding edge (such as skateboarding or devops), dealing with failure is a critical skill. Rodney talks about why people put themselves in this position, how they recover, and what they go on to achieve.

Now for the bonus! Some speakers have posted the videos of their afternoon sessions. These are longer, deeper talks on various topics. Luckily, some of the best sessions are available on YouTube:

Is TLS Fast Yet? – If you know performance then you know Ilya Grigorik. And if you know SPDY, HTTP/2, privacy, and security you know TLS is important. Here, the author of High Performance Browser Networking talks about how fast TLS is and what we can do to make it faster.
GPU and Web UI Performance: Building an Endless 60fps Scroller – Whoa! Whoa whoa whoa! Math?! You might not have signed up for it, but Diego Ferreiro takes us through the math and physics for smooth scrolling at 60 frames-per-second and his launch of ScrollerJS.
WebPagetest Power Users Part 1 and Part 2 – WebPagetest is one of the best performance tools out there. Pat Meenan, creator of WebPagetest, guides us through the new and advanced features.
Smooth Animation on Mobile Web, From Kinetic Scrolling to Cover Flow Effect – Ariya Hidayat does a deep dive into the best practices for smooth scrolling on mobile.
Encouraging Girls in IT: A How To Guide - Doug Ireton and his 7-year-old daughter, Jane Ireton, lament the lack of women represented in computer science and Jane’s adventure learning programming.

If you enjoy catching up using video, I recommend you watch these and other videos from the playlist. If you’re more of the “in-person” type, then I recommend you register for Velocity New York now. While you’re there, use my STEVE25 discount code for 25% off. I hope to see you in New York!

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