Velocity Origin Story
In 2007, my first book, High Performance Web Sites, was selling very well. That, plus the launch of YSlow, brought more attention to web performance. As a result, Jon Jenkins invited me to give a tech talk at Amazon. Afterward, he, John Rauser, and I, plus a few other performance-minded folk, had a great dinner and spirited discussion about performance best practices. Jon asked me if there was any place where people got together to have that type of discussion. I couldn’t think of one so promised to talk to O’Reilly about the idea of a conference.
I emailed my editor, Andy Oram, and asked if he thought a performance conference was a good idea. He agreed to setup a meeting with Tim O’Reilly at OSCON. That meeting included people that I would end up working closely with for the next decade: Tim, Andy, Gina Blaber, Brady Forrest, Jon Jenkins, Artur Bergman, and Jesse Robbins. (There were others there as well and I apologize for not remembering.) I’m not sure, but I think Jon invited Jesse to the meeting. Both of them worked at Amazon where Jesse was the “master of disaster” – helping to create a resilient infrastructure for their services.
We discussed the idea of a conference combining performance and operations. It made sense. Both groups (or “tribes” as Jesse called them) focused on optimization. The tools and stacks might have been different, but the mindset was the same. The first Velocity was held June 2008. Jesse and I were the co-chairs. I remember being surprised and grateful when Gina called me to ask if I would co-chair. It seems like that was a long time ago.
Take a look at the speaker list for that first Velocity – it contains many people who were or would become luminaries in emerging fields of DevOps and WPO – Web Performance Optimization (aka, FEO – Frontend End Optimization):
John Allspaw – future Velocity co-chair, current CTO at Etsy
Artur Bergman – founder of Fastly and who would become my future boss
Eric Goldsmith – worked with Pat Meenan at AOL on WebPageTest
Jason Grigsby – mobile guru with me this week at Velocity again!
Adam Jacob – CTO at Chef
Luke Kanies – founder of Puppet Labs
Eric Lawrence – OMG! Internet Explorer, Fiddler, now Google Chrome
John Rauser – OMG! Amazon, Pinterest, Snapchat, also with me this week at Velocity again!
Eric Schurman – Microsoft, now Amazon, and still on the Velocity Program Committee
Stoyan Stefanov – member of the original Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team, creator of the Performance Calendar, now at Facebook
Mandi Walls – keynoted at the very first Velocity, and sitting with me now in the Velocity speaker room again!
Transition
Yesterday, I announced this is my last Velocity as co-chair. I’ve been doing Velocity for a long time: nine years comprised of 21 shows (9 in California, 6 in Europe, 4 in New York, and 2 in Beijing). It feels good to open up the opportunity for someone else. Courtney Nash, who owns Velocity at O’Reilly, announced that performance will be merged with Fluent in 2017 to be chaired by Kyle Simpson and Tammy Everts. Also, Inés Sombra is the new co-chair for Velocity. The future looks good.
So many thank yous: O’Reilly Media for starting Velocity (and pushing me to accept that name over my choice, “Web Performance Conference”). Jesse Robbins, John Allspaw, James Turnbull and Courtney Nash for accepting me (putting up with me) as a Velocity co-chair. All the Program Committee members. The sponsors and vendors who supported Velocity. The amazing speakers over these past nine years. And all the attendees. We should pat each other on the back – it’s important to do that every once-in-a-while. We have created a strong, smart, caring, supportive community. Out of that have come numerous industries, technologies, and companies.
It has been an amazing experience. Thank you!