Velocity wrap-up

June 25, 2010 3:53 pm | 3 Comments

Velocity ended yesterday at 6pm – and the final presentations from 5:20-6:00 were still packed! It was a great conference. I’m wiped out from talking web performance from 8am to 10pm the last three days.

The highlight of the conference was the conference itself:

• 1200 attendees
• 89 speakers
• 28 sponsors
• 26 exhibitors

Compare that to the numbers for Velocity 2008: 600 attendees, 65 speakers, 9 sponsors, 17 exhibitors. The growth is a testimonial for how the focus on web performance and operations has increased in just 2 years. Companies know their web sites have to be fast, available, and scalable. That’s why they come to Velocity.

We added a third track this year on Culture which meant I wasn’t able to attend every performance talk. But here are the talks I saw that really stood out:

• Creating Cultural Change (video) and TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance (slides) – John Rauser (Amazon) was the breakthrough speaker of the conference. Both talks not only had great content, they were also funny and delivered with style.
• Datacenter Infrastructure Innovation (video) – James Hamilton (Amazon) presents surprising stats about the true costs of infrastructure services.
• Speed Matters (video) – Urs Hölzle (Google) evangelizes creating a faster web via a long list of performance initiatives. Make sure to check out the links at the end to SSL and congestion window improvements.
• The O’Reilly Radar (video, slides) – Tim O’Reilly leads the rally cry for the critical role of performance and operations to the future of the Web.
• Don’t Let Third Parties Slow You Down (video, slides) – Michael Kleber (Google) presents some great stats on the impact of 3rd party content, and at the end slips in some performance improvements he’s working on for Google AdSense.
• JSMeter: Characterizing Real-World Behavior of JavaScript Programs (slides) – Ben Zorn (Microsoft Research) reveals how unrepresentative today’s benchmarks are compared to real web sites. I really recommend you check out his charts.
• Building Performance Into the New Yahoo! Homepage (slides) – Nicholas Zakas (Yahoo!) provided a case study of adding advanced performance techniques including progressive enhancement.

There were other great talks such as The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS and Google Maps API v3 – Built First for Mobile for which we’re still waiting for slides and possibly video. I encourage you to check out all the slides and videos – remember, I was only able to sit in on one of three tracks. There’s a lot more to see.

Thanks for making Velocity 2010 so amazing. I’ll see you at Velocity 2011! (Remember to register early!)