Velocity is coming fast June 22-24

June 4, 2010 1:09 am | 1 Comment

Jesse Robbins and I co-chair Velocity – the web performance and operations conference run by O’Reilly. This year’s Velocity is coming fast (get it?) – June 22-24 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is the third year for Velocity. The first two years sold out, and this year is looking even stronger. We’ve added a third track so that’s 50% more workshops and sessions. That means more gurus to talk to and more topics to choose from.

Jesse did a post today about the ops side of the conference. Here are some of my favorites from the web performance track:

• Mobile Web High Performance – This workshop (workshops are on Tues June 22) is by O’Reilly author Maximiliano Firtman. Mobile is big and only a few people (including Maximiliano) know the performance side of mobile. His book? Programming the Mobile Web
• Progressive Enhancement: Tools and Techniques – The most important pattern I recommend for today’s web sites is to render the page quickly and adorn later with JavaScript. Some of the more advanced web apps are doing this, but otherwise it’s not a well known pattern. Annie is one of my favorite performance developers at Google. She has built sites that do progressive enhancement, so I’m super psyched that she agreed to give this workshop. Very important for anyone with a bunch of JavaScript in their site.
• Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage – Nicholas Zakas, JavaScript performance guru, talks about the real world story of making Yahoo! front page twice as fast.
• The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS – Nicole Sullivan (consultant) and Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo!) share their lessons learned optimizing the CSS for Facebook and Yahoo! Search.
• The Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer teams will be there to talk about the latest performance improvements to their browsers. That’s followed by the Browser Panel where you get to ask more questions.
• Lightning Demos on Wed and Thurs will give everyone a chance to see dynaTrace, Firebug, YSlow, Page Speed, HttpWatch, AOL (Web)Pagetest, Speed Tracer, and Fiddler.
• We have an amazing line-up of keynoters: Wednesday morning features James Hamilton (Amazon), Urs Hölzle (Google), and Tim O’Reilly (O’Reilly Media). All in one morning! Thursday brings back John Adams (Twitter) and Bobby Johnson (Facebook). Their Velocity 2009 talks were standing room only.

I’m looking forward to all the talks and catching up with the speakers. I’m most excited about the hallway conversations. It’s great hearing about what other developers have discovered during their own performance optimization projects. I especially enjoy how accessible the speakers are. It’s amazing how willing everyone is to share what they’ve learned and to work together to advance the state of web performance and operations. After all, that’s what Velocity is all about.