I got the opportunity to attend the Velocity 2010 Web Performance and Operations Conference last week with most of the rest of the guys from the Ops team at SugarCRM. It took place right around the same time as some other stuff I had going on, so I wasn't able to hang out "after hours" as much as I would have liked, but it was great to listen in on some great sessions and talk to people far smarter than I!

Some of the sessions to highlight:

• "A day in the life of Facebook operations" - Gathered some info on what happens when you scale bigger than pretty much everyone else in the world.
• "Datacenter Infrastructure Innovation" by James Hamilton - I've seen a video of an older version of his presentation, but still some new info coming in about stupid things we've been doing for years in our datacenters.
• "In the belly of the whale: Operations at Twitter" - similar to the Facebook presentation, but the name of one of their monitoring tools was worth the mention: "Whale Watcher"

There were also a number of sessions on different performance tools. Hopefully posts on some tested out for real are soon to come.

On the slightly less technical side, there were some great talks about culture, including quite a few talks on DevOps (more on that in a later post):

• "Creating Cultural Change" by John Rauser - some great examples on how to create change of culture within your organization by trickery, humor, and other methods
• "Ops Meta-Metrics: The currency you use to pay for change" by John Allspaw - was a great talk that could also be a blog post of its own. Basically, as operations people, we tend to be afraid of change because we associate it with downtime. To get around that, we change more often and track just how often things really do go wrong.
• "The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster Into an Opportunity" - Talk on how to use communication and transparency from downtime to create trust from your customers.
• "The Mobile Web: The next frontier" - presentation by Strangeloop on the monetary value of performance

Another great set of videos from the conference is the "Choose Your Own Adventure" talks with Adam Jacob from Opscode. You can head over to one of the videos and see them all listed in the related videos. I didn't get to that session, but watched all the videos and wish I had now :).

It was a great few days and was followed by DevOpsDay USA over at the LinkedIn campus, more on that to come!