High Performance Web Sites blog

I was in Portland for OSCON last week. There were many talks that attracted my attention - so many that I couldn’t get to them all. If you missed some talks, or didn’t make it to OSCON, check out this great effort capturing Oscon in 37 minutes. Gregg Pollack asked 45 speakers to summarize their talk in 30 seconds. Most people took longer (37 * 60 / 45 = 49.3 seconds), but still, to get a taste of 45 sessions in a 37 minute video is pretty awesome. If you had attended each session it would’ve taken over 34 hours! You can jump straight to the segment for any speaker (here’s mine), and links to each speaker’s slides are displayed.

This week I co-chaired Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly. It was great! Jesse and I told the story about how the conference came about. When we proposed the conference we believed there was a community of performance and operations engineers that needed a forum to share and learn, and the attendance at Velocity confirmed this. Velocity sold out with over 600 attendees!

The lineup of speakers was great. There was a lot of material packed in a 2-day conference. I stayed in the Performance track, but wanted to attend every session in the Operations track, too. Many speakers shared their slides, and there are videos and photos from some of the talks.

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I’ll be speaking at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco April 25 at 1:30pm. My talk is called Even Faster Web Sites. This is my next set of performance best practices including how to load scripts without blocking and the dangers of inline scripts. If you’re thinking of coming please the discount code “websf08sbg” to save an extra 10%.

Fluff piece: I was at SXSW Interactive this past weekend. Just like that AT&T commercial, my youngest daughter (5 years old) snuck her purple hippo into my suitcase. It’s always hard leaving my girls behind. Emailing photos back via my iPhone made the trip easier for them and me.

Most of the action was on the 4th floor of the convention center, so everyday started with a long escalator ride. This was my first year at SXSW, but several veterans mentioned how sessions were spread out more than usual. Several times I saw Freddy Wong, the US Guitar Hero 3 Champion, rocking out. Purple hippo wanted some of that action.

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Registration is now open for Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly. Velocity is scheduled for June 23-24 at the SFO Marriott in Burlingame, CA. Jesse Robbins and I are co-chairing. Several performance gurus are presenting. Topics covered include Ajax performance, CDNs, load balancing, measuring performance, and more. If you work in web performance or operations this is the event to make. The on-site registration price is $1595. If you register before May 5 it’s $1145. Use the discount code “vel08blg” to receive a 10% discount.

I hope to see you there!

-Steve