Where can you find leading experts from all major, large-scale, Internet companies giving engaging, technically advanced, and visionary presentations? Even more compelling, where will you also see senior engineers and company leaders putting aside competitiveness and, instead, putting their heads together to solve real-world challenges and plant seeds for the future of business on the Web?
This unique event, generating buzz across the engineering and business worlds after only its second year, is Velocity, an O’Reilly conference held in the center of Silicon Valley, June 20-22, 2009.
Conference creators envisioned the “go-to” conference of the year, one that, in their words:
...brings together representatives from industry leaders like Google, Facebook, Microsoft…You’ll meet the people who are doing the best performance and operations work in the world.
OmniTI was happy to play a role in maintaining the momentum of this influential gathering, standing alongside giants such as Amazon, Flickr, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. We’re in our element when scalability and improving the user experience through performance are vital. Our deep involvement in the open source movement, development of large enterprise projects, and numerous foundational books authored by OmniTI staff, make us a perfect fit for Velocity.
Our CEO Theo Schlossnagle’s Scalable Internet Architectures (slides: PDF, slides: Slideshare) was the highest-rated workshop and one of the most well-received of all types of sessions.
Speaking to a packed room, Theo, author of Scalable Internet Architectures, analyzed the challenges of designing and operating web sites (both large and small) to cope with sudden and often devastating traffic conditions common on today’s turbulent Internet. He examined vulnerabilities and pinpointed both stop-gap measures and complete solutions.
As one attendee tweeted, “This is the most useful hour I’ve spent in months.” Theo is a veteran in the open source movement who regularly designs and implements scalable solutions for highly trafficked sites and companies in need of sound, scalable architectural engineering.
Over 700 people attended Velocity, including developers, engineers, technical executives, CTOs and CIOs, entrepreneurs, and academics. The conference’s web site is a rich repository of videos, resources, commentary, slides, and links to blog posts.
Significant was the overall desire from companies to intensively share experiences and collaborate in problem-solving and take fresh looks at topics such as the measurable impact of slowness (front-end and back) on user experience and retaining clients. As Theo wrote in his blog,
it focused heavily on operational strategy and and what it takes to execute tactically…The people I met at this conference were both honest and open and provided a fabulous and refreshing perspective on what today’s performance and scalability problems really are.
With such a high concentration of world-class brainpower zeroing in on topics that dramatically affect ROI, Velocity should become the conference of the year for savvy journalists and, more importantly, smart business managers.