• Stupid L4 (round robin)
• Slightly smarter L4 (least connection, weighted RR, etc)
• L7, or inspection based load balancing.
• Perlbal. Guess that’s also L7

In this session we’ll briefly go over each of the basic load balancing algorithms as they’re implemented in popular open source load balancers.

In a second half we’ll show some synthetic load testing situations to illustrate how traffic handles under the different algorithms.

Noticed your servers overloading all the time? Perhaps they’re idle 50% of the time? Want to minimize latency? You might want a thorough understanding of load balancing.

Kasindorf is the MySQL DBA for Six Apart’s properties, as well as many of their scaling tools. A sysadmin for livejournal.com in 2002, he has since helped build numerous large web sites with open source software and is an advocate and contributor for Memcached, mogilefs, perlbal, and others.

AOL PageTest – Eric Goldsmith (AOL, LLC) AOL PageTest was introduced at Velocity 2008. This presentation provides an introduction for new users, as well as an update on new features for existing users. Both the stand-alone and hosted versions will be demonstrated.

HttpWatch – Simon Perkins (Simtec Limited) A demonstration of HttpWatch version 6.0 being used to highlightHTTP related performance issues in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

YSlow 2.0 – Stoyan Stefanov (Yahoo! Inc) YSlow is an extension to Firefox that inspects the currently loaded page and checks for compliance with the best practices. It has been downloaded by over 500K developers and is used by 100K developers daily. The new YSlow 2.0 comes with more best practices, but is also highly customizable and extensible so you can add your own custom company requirements. Come and learn how to make your web pages fly and attract repeated visitors, because, at the end, we all hate slow pages.

Visual Round Trip Analyzer – Jim Pierson (Microsoft) Visual Round Trip Analyzer is a free tool available for download. We use this tool internally at Microsft to look at our web sites. The tool sits on top of Netmon 3.1, a packet analyzer, also a free download from Microsoft. I will show several features: a) The visual download chart which shows downloads in a more accurate way than other tools available, as HTTP1.1 with TCP ports reused instead of HTTP1.0 with one file per port. b) File by File analysis – shows file size, timing, compression potential for files not compressed, expiration dates,etc. c) Best Practice Analysis – your page is graded against 15 rules with an A through F rating. Each file that breaks a rule is listed as an exception. d) Packet level drill down – go beyond the expert and look at the details of each packet.

Firebug – Jan Odvarko (Freelance) This presentation shows how Firebug is used to diagnose and improve web-page load performance. The presentation focuses on Net panel, which monitors page network activity. Live demo included.

Eric Goldsmith, Operations Architect at AOL, has more than 18 years of experience in the areas of product development, engineering and operations. At AOL he has led efforts to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability for top Web sites, including: AOL.com; AIM.com; and AOLVideo; among others.

His areas of expertise include Performance Analysis, Capacity Planning, Network Engineering and Security, and Software and Product Development. Prior to AOL, Eric worked for companies such as UUNet, WorldCom and CompuServe, as well as telecom and Internet startups. He holds a BS in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.

Simon Perkins is the CEO and Founder of Simtec Limited

I work for Yahoo!’s Exceptional Performance team. My daily tasks include research, experiments and building tools (such as YSlow) to improve the performance of the Yahoo! properties worldwide. I’m also a contributor to several open source projects and author of a few books and numerous online articles. Creator of the smush.it (http://smushit.com) online image optimization tool.

At Microsoft since 1996, Jim initially built tools to collect and analyze router and WAN statistics. After optimizing the WAN for 300 offices, he found many apps across the WAN were still slow. This led Jim to focus on the communications between client and server and build up a class he calls, Building Network Smart Applications. Since 2001 Jim has led efforts focused on improving web site performance for MSN and Live. Jim will be presenting the Visual Round Trip Analyzer (VRTA) tool now available on download.microsoft.com.

Jan Odvarko is independent software consultant currently working for Mozilla. He previously cofounded AllPeers and has been active in Firefox extension development for many years. He is currently spending most of his time contributing to the Firebug project (open source in-browser development tool).

Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) is CEO of Opscode and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar . Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Cuzillion, and Hammerhead. He is co-chair of Velocity and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo.

• Added server side delays
• Added additional page weight to different parts of our page
• Added client side rendering delays

We then measured how each of these changes impacted metrics like clicks, time to click, repeat site usage, queries per visit, revenue, etc.

This talk is to share the results.

Eric Schurman has been working with the web since the early versions of NCSA Mosaic. In his most recent gig at Microsoft, he’s in charge of site performance for Live Search. He’s worn many other hats at Microsoft, including architect and development lead of Microsoft.com’s highest traffic sites, the home page and Download Center. His experiences writing books on web development, working with disabled users, and teaching classes in computer use have given him a passion for doing the right thing for the customer.

Jake Brutlag is a data analyst with 9 years of industry experience, first at Microsoft, then at Google. He has published papers on distinct value estimation, email classification, aberrant behavior detection for network time series, and search engine latency.

Umang Gupta has served since 1997 as chairman and chief executive officer of Keynote Systems (NASDAQ: KEYN), the global leader in test and measurement solutions that improve mobile communications and online business performance. A well-known technology visionary and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Umang began his career in 1973 with IBM. Umang joined Oracle Corporation in 1981 where he wrote the first business plan for the company, and served as Vice President and General Manager of the Microcomputer Products Division through 1984. He left Oracle to become Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Gupta Corporation, which he took public in 1993 (NASDAQ: GPTA). Gupta Corporation was responsible for ushering in the era of enterprise client/server computing by introducing many seminal innovations, including the world’s first client/server relational database system for PC networks in 1988. Umang has also been an active investor and advisor to a number of Silicon Valley start-up companies including serving on the Board of Trustees of Mosaix, a publicly held call-center systems company from 1997 to 1999 until its sale to Lucent Technologies.

Umang received his Bachelor of Technology degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kanpur in 1971 and his M.B.A. from Kent State University in Ohio, USA in 1972. In 1996, Umang received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur for his outstanding contributions to Information Technology and entrepreneurial achievements. In addition to his professional activities, Umang has previously served on the board of the Peninsula Community Foundation, a San Mateo based public charity that builds investment and involvement in community. He is also an avid history buff and serves on the Board of the San Mateo Historical Association. He is also Chairman of the IIT Kanpur Foundation and Board Chairman of PanIIT USA. In 2000, Umang was the honored recipient of the Asian Pacific Foundation Award for Civic Leadership and Philanthropy.

Vik Chaudhary has been at Keynote for 6 years managing Keynote’s flagship products – Transaction Perspective® and Application Perspective® – and has extended the company into new markets via ten acquisitions. He has spent 19 years in chief executive, product strategy and engineering positions at blue-chip and start-up technology companies, holds a B. S. in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT and is a frequent speaker at Web performance industry events.

However, it also can be frustrating when it comes to communication, problems, and downtime.

Perhaps more importantly, cloud services can make you lazy. Why worry too much about deleting files when you have (more or less) infinite storage? $.10 a GB starts to add up.

Small company veteran Justin graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in computer engineering and has played key roles in startups ranging from imaging SONAR at BlueView Technologies, home automation at 1Control/Pluto, and non-relational databases at Applied Technical Systems. Since moving into the corner window desk at Picnik World HQ, he’s been busy with many tasks, most having to do with Linux, and finds that his adventurous resume has proved useful when building, scaling, and dumping water on Picnik’s ever-expanding infrastructure. When not at work, you’ll usually find him out on a run, strapped to a scuba tank, attempting some new feat of home improvement, or being urged into a triathlon by fellow Picniker Mike. His plans for 2009 include hitting the lecture circuit and figuring out a way to incorporate SONAR technology into Picnik’s virtualized data center.

We will cover some of the innovative features of Page Speed that we have used at Google, including identifying inefficient CSS selectors, identifying unused JavaScript and CSS, and the Page Speed Activity Panel, which renders a timeline of network and local events.

We also mention upcoming features such as paint events and screen snapshots in the Activity Panel and early success stories with using Page Speed.

During Bryan’s time at Google, he has contributed to various projects that make the web faster, including Shared Dictionary Compression over HTTP, optimizing web servers to better utilize HTTP, and most recently, the Page Speed web performance tool. Prior to working on web performance, Bryan was the first full time engineer on the Google TV Ads team, where he helped to build some of Google’s TV ad auction and video management systems.

Richard Rabbat is a product manager at Google. He recently released Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that analyzes web pages and gives suggestions on how to improve them in addition to doing some of the optimizations itself. He works on projects that power Google’s infrastructure including latency measurements for Google apps. Previously, Richard worked on data center technologies.

Richard was VP of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Club of Northern California where he helped incubate the green energy and clean technologies program.

Richard is a Senior Member of IEEE and holds a Ph.D. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters degree in Computer and Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

• Initial problems and bottlenecks at the beginning of the primary election season.
• How optimizing MySQL and the backend improved performance.
• How moving to lighttpd and moving page caching into lighttpd with a custom module greatly improved performance.
• How moving to newer and less hardware improved performance, and how it was done.
• And how sometimes you need to fail spectacularly before you can really get it right.

Jeremy Bingham is the CTO and man-behind-the-curtain for DailyKos.com, a progressive Democratic weblog that is one of the largest sites in the political blogosphere. He considers himself lucky that a gig with the State of Washington fell through a while back, because otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this.

Everything is running fine and BAM! – your site is linked from the front page of Yahoo! What do you do? How can you handle that sudden rush of traffic. Requests per second are running 5x normal levels. Servers have CPUspikes. Daemons are hitting the maximums. You are running out of bandwidth. How could you have been prepared for this? What are the tools and techniques for this type of sudden rush?

Or, lets say you have just come out of a meeting where everyone discovered that your site is growing in traffic 70% – 80% year over year. That means that 1 million page views this month will be nearly 3 million this time in 2 years. How can you plan for that? You don’t want to redesign the whole architecture every 2 years. What methods could be used to deal with this constant long term growth?

While there is no magic bullet for either of these scenarios, there are techniques used by many sites out there to help you get through these situations. This session will cover some of these techniques and talk about their pros and cons.

Brian Moon has been working with the LAMP platform since before it was called LAMP. He is the Senior Web Engineer for dealnews.com. He has made a few small contributions to the PHP project and been a casual participant in discussions on the PHP internals list. He is the founder and lead developer of the Phorum project, the first PHP/MySQL message board ever created.

We’ll look at the role of Operations in an architecture migration of this scale, including: application stack design, scaling and capacity planning, tools, redundancy, and network planning. We’ll also discuss how migrating an existing application, where the use cases and user behavior are well known, compares to building a brand new application with no pre-existing audience. We’ll also look at how we were able to apply the knowledge gained in the outgoing platform to the incoming platform.

Mandi Walls is a Principal System Administrator at AOL, where she is currently responsible for the daily care and feeding of AOL.com. She has also been involved with AOL’s Channels, Video, News, and Travel sites. Mandi holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from George Washington University and is pursuing an MBA at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. In her spare time, Mandi has taught undergraduate IT classes and does volunteer work.

While I’m proud that my initial design withstood the test of implementation, there were of course false starts and wrong turns. In the talk I’ll detail three problems and the solutions that got me to production.

• False start #1: my new-guy lack of understanding of the old system combined with my starry-eyed desire to use some new technology (Thrift in this case). Hoping to reduce disk I/O concerns, I started throwing log files around line-by-line using a Thrift service. The results were massive network congestion and a more difficult path to failure recovery.

• False start #2: I’ll go through another case of small software design tweaks making a huge difference in MySQL performance when tuning InnoDB isn’t enough.

• False start #3: When you’re aggregating anything in memory, you’ve got to expect std::bad_alloc to come around eventually. At first, I tried to tally memory usage and proactively free some when necessary but found this to be inaccurate and crash-prone. The production version can gracefully handle these memory exceptions without data loss.

After the tour of some of the implementation challenges, I’ll walk through the architecture of the entire production system from DNS servers through the map-reduce pipeline to databases and onto the website for all of our users. I’ll also share some of the (less common) tools I found indispensible.

Richard started his career as part of the Yahoo! Intern Class of 2006 and was subsequently offered a position at Flickr. After building the Flickr Uploadr, today used by millions of Flickr users around the world, Richard left Flickr to join OpenDNS, the world’s largest and fastest-growing DNSprovider. At OpenDNS, Richard leads engineering on backend systems, namely the DNS Stats processing system which handles more than 8 billion DNS queries daily. Richard is a 2007 graduate of Washington University in Saint Louis, where he earned Bachelor’s Degrees in Computer Engineering and Computer Science.

Ed Robinson is Chief Executive Officer of Aptimize Software, the world leader in automated website performance tuning. Ed concentrates on simple solutions for the world’s website speed problems – no one should have to wait for slow web pages to load, Aptimize Website Accelerator fixes the problem instantly.

Eric Goldsmith, Operations Architect at AOL, has more than 18 years of experience in the areas of product development, engineering and operations. At AOL he has led efforts to deliver the highest levels of performance and availability for top Web sites, including: AOL.com; AIM.com; and AOLVideo; among others.

His areas of expertise include Performance Analysis, Capacity Planning, Network Engineering and Security, and Software and Product Development. Prior to AOL, Eric worked for companies such as UUNet, WorldCom and CompuServe, as well as telecom and Internet startups. He holds a BS in Computer Science from The Ohio State University.

Artur Bergman, hacker and technologist at-large, is the VP of Engineering and Operations at Wikia. He provides the technical backbone necessary for Wikia’s mission to compile and index the world’s knowledge. He is also an enthusiastic apologist for federated identity and a board member of the OpenID Foundation. In past lives, he’s built high volume financial trading systems, re-implemented Perl 5’s threading system, wrote djabberd, managed LiveJournal’s engineering team, and served as operations architect at Six Apart. His current interests extend to encompass semantic search, large scale infrastructure, open source development, federated instant messaging, neurotransmitters, and the future of cyborgs.

An 8 year Yahoo! veteran, I have worked directly with display ad delivery for the last 4. One aspect of this work is the monitoring and analysis of 3rd Party ad quality and performance. This work has helped lead to the formation of an IAB Working Group with other major publishers on ad performance.

Bryant Mason is a Principal Test Manager with the Microsoft Advertising Research and Development Group, where he is responsible for performance engineering. He has been optimizing large-scale Internet services at Microsoft since the late 90s. Over the past nine years, he has been busy building advertising platforms that handle tens of billions of requests each day. When not working on the next generation advertising platform for Microsoft, he contributes to industry standards for on-line ad performance.

Sameer has been building large-scale distributed systems at Google since 2004, including work on parallel data processing, Bigtable, and, most recently, content delivery systems for DoubleClick image and video ad creatives. He is now leading a new effort at Google to make the Web faster by making ads load faster.

Since 1996 Richard has worked in internet and computing related industries, during this time he has been involved in development of commercial websites and marketing technology.

During Richard’s 6 years at RBI UK, he has been involved with best practice and creation of many of RBI’s ad funded websites.

In his current role as a Director at ADTECH US, Richard has responsibility for the teams that implement theADTECH AD server for customers, and has many years of hands on experience with day to day ad delivery, for many of ADTECH’s largest customers.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Cuzillion, and Hammerhead. He is co-chair of Velocity and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo.

Utilizing a mixture of open source tools (such as Chef, Nanite, CouchDB, and RabbitMQ) and battle-tested techniques, Adam and Ezra will show you how to build an infrastructure that’s easy to manage, integrates with your application, and is self-documenting. Along the way, they’ll give you the key insights you need to get maximum benefit from these technologies for your business.

The speakers come from two companies well-known in this space. Engine Yard is moving to the cloud – in addition to their own internal hosting offering they built their stellar reputation on. Opscode brings “infrastructure automation to the masses”. Born from years of experience building fully automated infrastructure for dozens of startups, they are the creators of Chef.

A twelve year system operations veteran, Adam is the CTO of Opscode, whose mission is to bring “Infrastructure Automation to the Masses”. He is the primary author of Chef.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz is a founder and Director of Software Engineering for Engine Yard, a scalable Ruby hosting platform. He has been active in the ruby community for over 4 years with contributions to many open source projects such as Rails, Merb, Rack and Rubinius. He is the author of Deploying Rails Application for the pragmatic programmers and is an active speaker at many ruby and Cloud computing based events.

Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) is CEO of Opscode and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar . Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

Steve Souders works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. His book High Performance Web Sites explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, Cuzillion, and Hammerhead. He is co-chair of Velocity and co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He taught CS193H High Performance Web Sites at Stanford, and frequently speaks at conferences including OSCON, The Ajax Experience, SXSW, and Web 2.0 Expo.

For MySQL driven websites, horizontal sharding is often the long term solution to scale. But what if you cannot afford to stop your site and work on implementing the sharding layer? Is there any hope for you? Luckily, yes! You can perform quick analysis of your data access patterns and take actions to ensure your working data set fits in the memory. And, in the cases where disk I/O cannot be avoided, you can ensure that your data is laid out on disk in a manner than allows you to retrieve it with minimal number of disk seeks. Most of the strategies discussed in this session, require little or no application changes, allowing you to improve performance literally overnight.

We will explore strategies on how to optimize your data based on application access patterns and make your working data set fit within memory to decrease I/O and response times.

Frank Mashraqi is a renowned speaker and scalability advisor to several startups. He comes to NetEdge with nearly a decade of scalability, engineering management and monetization experience. Prior to NetEdge, Frank was Director of Business Operations and Technical Strategy for Fotolog where he played a pivotal role in helping Fotolog scale to become the 13th largest website on the Internet (Alexa: based on traffic) and the third most actively used social network in the world (ComScore). Frank holds a BBA in Accounting and a BS in Computer Information Systems.

J. Bradley Chen manages the Native Client project at Google, where he has also worked on cluster performance analysis projects. Prior to joining Google, he was Director of the Performance Tools Lab in Intel’s Software Products Division. Chen served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1994-1998, conducting research in operating systems, computer architecture and distributed system, and teaching a variety of related graduate and undergraduate courses. He has published widely on the subjects of systems performance and computer architecture. Dr. Chen has bachelors and masters degrees from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.

1. Each feature is integrated into many pages. There is large common intersection of HTML, Javascript, and stylesheets between pages. As a user clicking through page by page, there is a big overhead for the browser to re-execute the common Javascripts and re-loading contents, even they are cached locally;
2. Almost every page of Facebook contains web content from more than one feature developed by different product teams. It is a challenge to evaluate the impact of a new feature on frontend performance due to the mix of features on a page;
3. Features in a page not only depend on the fast product cycles but also depend on user adoption of the features. Performance optimization has to be self-adaptive and maintainable through the fast feature evolutions.

In this talk, we present some of our work on improving and maintaining frontend performance. We will discuss in details of our experience in building and operating such an infrastructure, particularly in the following areas:

1. Using AJAX to render full pages: Traditionally, AJAX is used to fetch dynamic content and render part of the page responding to user interaction. Facebook has developed a framework that uses AJAX to render the full page, while still maintaining the user experience of a “transition of page” by simulating such an experience with Javascript. This fullpage-AJAX framework eliminates the browser overhead of reloading contents and re-executing scripts across different pages.
2. Measurement and Performance Testing: We have developed a performance measurement framework to monitor and analyze site speed. Besides the traditional monitoring features, the framework provides A/B testing capability and integrates with the feature launching system. It makes possible to evaluate overall performance impact of a new feature, even on pages with a mix of evolving features.
3. Adaptive Static Resource Packaging: Many static resource packaging systems run on build time for features—product developers specify all static resources a feature might need, and the build system groups them into Javascript/CSS packages and image sprites. As our pages have many features and each feature is evolving quickly, build-time systems do not adapt well. We developed an adaptive packaging system, which optimizes the static resources based on the measurement of production usages. With a cost-benefit analytic model, the system identifies the optimal packaging strategy, and automatically re-balances the packages to track the feature evolution.

Xiaoliang “David” Wei is a research scientist at Facebook, where he works on front-end performance. He focuses on user latency measurement, end user latency optimization, and best practices for maintaining long-term web performance. Prior to Facebook, David worked on network simulation, TCP enhancement, QoS, and peer-to-peer file sharing systems at Google and two startups. David holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Tsinghua University, China, and a PhD in computer science from Caltech, where he co-invented FastTCP, a new Internet congestion control algorithm that led to the startup FastSoft Inc.

Dr. Changhao Jiang is a research scientist at Facebook Inc. His responsibilities at Facebooks are mainly focused on improving Facebook’s user perceived performance and making the site more scalable. Specifically, he currently leads the Quickling project at Facebook which ajaxifies the whole website. He also designed and implemented a client side caching system calledPageCache to cache users’ visited pages at client side browser. Changhao is also one of the lead developers for the XHProf project, which was open-sourced by Facebook in March 2009. Prior to joining Facebook, Dr. Changhao Jiang worked at Google for a year. He also worked as a researcher at Carnegie MellonUniversity for two years. Changhao holds a bachelor’s of science degree and a master’s of science degree from Tsinghua University, and Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

For deploying new code, planning projects, and crisis management, communications and cooperation between development and operations is paramount. As web infrastructures grow, the line between systems and software become quite blurred. Operations and development are disciplines that historically have been limited to a predictable list of responsibilities and have suffered from a culture of finger-pointyness.

We’ll talk about why and how these roles have mixed in Flickr’s environment for the better.

We’ll discuss tools, techniques, culture, and the processes of transparency that enables a healthy respect for the Big Red Deploy Button™ as well as incident management, escalation, and troubleshooting.

Tools, techniques, and culture:

• Overview of our one-button code deployment, application-level logging, and dev/ops communications tools.
• Examples of adaptive monitoring and metrics collection, capacity awareness and planning must-haves.
• Rethinking the ops/developer relationship and mutual respect for responsibilities and expertise.

John has worked in systems operations for over ten years in biotech, government and online media. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructures at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster.com and Flickr.com, where he currently manages the Operations Engineering group.

He is the author of “The Art of Capacity Planning: Scaling Web Resources”

Paul Hammond is a web developer, product manager and father. He has been building websites for as long as he can remember, and now leads a team of hard-working supernerds at Flickr. Before then he was part of the Yahoo Brickhouse team, and previously led technical project management at BBC Radio and Music interactive.

Paul regularly speaks on subjects from Javascript and APIs to the future of broadcasting, at events including South By Southwest, Web 2.0 expo and Web Directions North. He currently lives in San Francisco, and keeps an irregularly updated technical weblog at paulhammond.org

Matt Mullenweg blogs at ma.tt. He is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software he guided from a handful of users to the most widely used open source blog tool. In late 2005 he left CNET to found Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet.com, and Gravatar. In his spare time he enjoys taking photographs and playing jazz.

Kyle Scholz is a Software Engineer at Google, where he focuses on Search performance and infrastructure.

Yaron is a software engineer on the web search infrastructure team. In his role, he focuses on writing software to ensure that Google Search is as fast as possible. He also provides consultation and guidance for new features, helping to ensure that they conform with the fast and consistent experience that users expect.

Yaron has a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from the University of Waterloo, where he graduated with distinction on the Dean’s List.

Ben Galbraith is the co-director of Developer Tools at Mozilla. Ben has long juggled interests in both business and tech, having written his first computer program at six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce at twelve. He has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide, produced several technical conferences, and co-authored over a half-dozen books. He has enjoyed a variety of business and technical roles throughout his career, including CEO, CIO, CTO, and Chief Software Architect roles in medical, publishing, media, manufacturing, advertising, and software industries. He lives in Palo Alto with his wife and five children.

Dion Almaer is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading source of the Ajax community. For his day job, Dion co-leads a new group at Mozilla focusing on developer tools for the Web, which is something he has been passionate about doing for years. He is is excited for the opportunity, and gets to work with Ben Galbraith, his partner in crime on Ajaxian and now at Mozilla!

Dion has been writing rich web applications from the beginning, has been fortunate enough to speak around the world, and has published many articles, a book, and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog. Dion also used to work for Google, in the Open Web group!

Dr. John Busch is a co-founder of Schooner Information Technology. Prior to Schooner, Dr. Busch was Research Director of Computer System Architecture and Analysis at Sun Microsystems laboratories from 1999 through 2006. In this role, he led research explorations in chip-multi-processing, advanced multi-tier clustered systems for deployment of internet based services, and advanced HPC systems. Dr. Busch received the top President’s Award for Innovation at Sun, and oversaw many division technology transfers. Prior to Sun, Dr. Busch was VP of Engineering and Business Partnerships with Diba Inc, and was general manager of the Diba Division after Sun acquired Diba in 1997. From 1989 to 1994, Dr. Busch was co-founder and CTO/VP of Engineering of Clarity Software, and led creation of advanced multi-media composition and communication products for Sun, HP, and IBM computer systems (awarded Unix World Product of the Year). From 1976 to 1993, Dr. Busch led many successful R&D programs at Hewlett Packard in Computer Systems Research and Development. Dr. Busch holds a Ph.D. in Computer Systems Architecture from UCLA, a Masters degree in Mathematics from UCLA, a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and attended the Sloan Program at Stanford University.