Last year’s Velocity conference was an incredible success. We expected around 400 people and we ended up maxing out the facility with over 600. This year we’re moving the conference to a bigger space and extending it to 3 days to accommodate workshops and longer sessions.
Velocity 2009 will be on June 22-24th, 2009 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA.
This year’s conference will be especially important. I’ve said many times that Web Performance and Operations is critical to the success of every company that depends on the web. In the current economic situation, it’s becoming a matter of survival. The competitive advantage comes from the ability to do two things:
- Generate more revenue with fewer resources
- Respond quickly to change
Our Velocity 2009 mantra is “Fast, Scalable, Efficient, Available”, a slight change from last year. (We’ve replaced “Resilient” with “Efficient” to make focus clear.)
I’m excited to announce that joining Steve Souders & I on this year’s program committee are John Allspaw, Artur Bergman, Scott Ruthfield, Eric Schurman, and Mandi Walls. We’ve already started working on the program, and have just opened the Call for Participation.
We’re especially interested in the following topics:
- How to tie web performance and operations to the bottom line
- Real-world incident management – getting “tight like a pit crew”
- Making websites as fast and reliable as desktop apps
- Networking, DNS, and load balancing
- Profiling everywhere: JavaScript, CSS, and the network
- Managing web services – flaming disasters you survived and lessons learned
- The intersection between performance and design
- Wicked cool (and actionable) metrics
- Ads, ads, ads – the performance killer?
- Troubleshooting in production
- How to scale and be fast on the social web
- Capacity planning and load testing
- Establishing performance and operations best practices within your organization
- Configuration management best (and worst) tools and practices
- Monitoring and instrumentation experiences: Open Source, as a service, commercially supported solutions
- Using multiple CDNs to improve customer experience and reduce cost