Thanks to the company I work for, I was able to go to this year’s Velocity Conference in San Jose, CA! What a great trip, and great speakers! I wasn’t as social as I could have been, since it was my first time in California (a coworker and I took some time after the talks every day to see a little bit of the area), but I plan on making the rounds next year.
What did I take away from this experience? I feel Velocity Conference really serves a need in the community to bring folks with like goals together to learn from one another. The quality of the content in each presentation was really outstanding, and better than I would have imagined. This wasn’t just some PR person from each of the companies, but a real live developer or infrastructure person who shared his or her thoughts on the subject matter at hand. Yeah, we had some “ad” content from obvious PR folks, but this was not the bulk or focus of the talks.
As for what I learned, it’s that there’s always someone out there with a similar set of problems and experiences. I was happy to hear that the company I work for does a lot of things the right way, or is lined up with how a proven successful company plans to proceed in the future. We also do a few things the wrong way, or in lesser quantities than we really should. The subject matter really made an impact regarding how I will approach certain situations, and has lit a fire under me to get some things rolling for our development and infrastructure folks.
I was not expecting the talks to be as in depth as some pertaining to the operations side of a company. This was driven home by more than one speaker emphasizing the same points over and over. Without change control management, a company cannot scale internally, let alone the application being developed. I believe this speaks for itself.
Another side of the talks that was a little lighter was regarding browsers and web applications. The desire for IE6 to go away forever was evident in more than one talk, and the graphs for browser performance only made this point all the more clear. One quote presented in a slide said, “We’ve upped our standards, up yours”, by Joe Clark. I took this to mean, “You can’t wait for the users to follow you, or you’ll be stuck with their level of technology forever.”
Some people don’t know what “cloud” computing is to this day, and I was really saddened by this during a couple of the talks. If you have piles of servers in a data center, it’s not a “cloud”. If you sell hardware, you aren’t selling it for use in a “cloud”. Cloud computing is strictly the virtual infrastructure one can lease through an organization that manages all aspects of the hardware and networking for you. Xen instances that can be fired up and destroyed with the click of a mouse is cloud computing.
Cloud computing is also about extending infrastructure, not replacing it. Everyone who uses cloud services has at least one datacenter somewhere, acting as a mothership for the processes and data that get tossed into the cloud when capacity is needed.
Velocity 2009 was a great experience, and I look forward to next year’s event!