It’s a new year and that means more geekSessions! Join us on Tuesday, January 15 at the City Club in SF for an exciting event covering PHP scalability, prerformance, and the future. We are going to have a great panel discussion, catered reception, and an open bar.
Event Info
What: geekSessions 1.3: PHP Scalability, Performance, and the Future
When: Tuesday, January 15th, 6:00pm-9:00pm
6:00pm – Registration, open bar, and appetizers
6:30pm – Panel discussion and Q&A (bar closed)
8:00pm – Open Bar, dinner, and networking
Where: The City Club of SF, Google Map: 155 Sansome, 10th Floor
How: A limited number of tickets are now open to the public! Get them while they last.
Transportation: Parking can be a bit tricky in the financial district at this time, so it’s highly recommended you take public transportation. If you must drive, your best bet may be to park in the parking structure for the Metreon over on 4th and Mission and walk to the event.
Submit a Question for the Panel
Got something you’re itching to ask? Use our form to submit a question for the panel. Selected questions will be asked by the moderator, Terry Chay, Software Architect at Tagged.
We’re excited about Macworld and we’re even more excited about tonight’s event. It’s another sold out geekSessions and we can’t wait to see what our speakers have to present.
Didn’t get a ticket in time? No problem! We’re broadcasting it to you live with help from our friends over at Justin.tv. The event starts at 6pm PST and the speakers go on at 6:30pm PST. Their presentation slides are posted below so you can follow along at home too. Thanks for looking and be sure to sign up for our mailing list to find out about the next event!
Speaker Presentations
Cal Henderson (pending)
Director of Engineering, Flickr
Lucas Nealan (PDF)
Lead Engineer, Facebook
Sara Golemon (PPT)
Senior Engineer, Yahoo! Inc.
Andrei Zmievski (PDF)
Chief Architect, Outspark
About the Panelists
Sara Golemon
Sr. Engineer, Yahoo! Inc.
Sara Golemon is an engineer for Yahoo! Web Search and part-time OSS code-monkey. She’s a PHP runtime and Zend engine developer who literally wrote the book on “Extending and Embedding PHP”. Sara’s been featured several times on podcasts such as php|architect’s Pro::PHP, and the Zend developer zone PHP-Abstract. As a hobbyist in the field of cyrptography, she’s the originator behind the libssh2 C library and several PHP focused extensions centered around symmetric, asymmetric, and message digest algorithms.
Cal Henderson
Director of Engineering, Flickr
Originally from London, England, Cal Henderson currently works at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He’s been working on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) to the present day. In 2006, he wrote the book Building Scalable Websites for O’Reilly Media. Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communitites, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. (Photo by Scott Beale)
Lucas Nealan
Lead Engineer, Facebook
Lucas is a web developer with over 10 years experience. He has worked with PHP since 2000 and is currently a Lead Engineer at Facebook.com, one of the largest PHP infrastructures in the world. Lucas has been working at Facebook for the last two and a half years on PHP performance and scalability.
Andrei Zmievski
Chief Architect, Outspark Inc.
Andrei Zmievski is Chief Architect at Outspark Inc, where he is working on a technology platform for building an online playground with free video games and engaging communities. In the past he had worked on internal tools at Yahoo! Inc., specializing in i18n and infrastructure software, such as PHP and Apache. He is also a core PHP developer, leader of the PHP-GTK project, and a co-author of “PHP Developer’s Cookbook” and Smarty templating system. His current focus is the native Unicode support in PHP.
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The latest geekSessions event info is here, and it’s going to be better than ever! Join us on Tuesday, October 2 at the City Club in SF for a great panel discussion, catered reception, and open bar.
For this session, we’re diving into database design—both from the perspective of traditional best practices as well as new technologies and techniques on accelerating the performance and increasing the availability and integrity of data in high-demand environments.
We’ll tackle a broad range of data related issues such as when to normalize versus de-normalize, when to use an RDBMS versus an alternative, pros and cons of various platforms, and pros and cons of building more sophisticated data management into the application layer.
Event Info
What: geekSessions 1.2: Designing Beyond the Database
When: Tuesday, October 2nd, 6:00pm-9:00pm
6:00pm – Registration, open bar, and appetizers
6:30pm – Panel discussion and Q&A (bar closed)
8:00pm – Open Bar, dinner, and networking
Where: The City Club of SF, Google Map: 155 Sansome, 10th Floor
How: A limited number of tickets are now open to the public! Get them while they last.
Transportation: Parking can be a bit tricky in the financial district at this time, so it’s highly recommended you take public transportation. If you must drive, your best bet may be to park in the parking structure for the Metreon over on 4th and Mission and walk to the event.
3 hours isn’t enough, you say? Ticketholders will be emailed details of the geekSessions after-party!
Submit a Question for the Panel
Got something you’re itching to ask? Use our form to submit a question for the panel. Selected questions will be asked by the moderator.
About the Panelists
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Lead, Sun Microsystems
Josh Berkus is primarily known as one of the Core Team of the world-spanning, open source database project, PostgreSQL. He has been involved with various open source projects since 1998—including OpenOffice.org, LedgerSMB, Bricolage, and OpenBRR. He currently sits on the board of Software in the Public Interest, Inc. Sun Microsystems employs Josh in its Database Technology Group as the strategic lead for Sun’s PostgreSQL for Solaris product offering.
Arnold Goldberg
Senior Director of Systems Engineering, eBay
Originally involved in the conversion of the site to Java, Arnold’s group is now involved in many parts of the site’s infrastructure. These areas include eBay’s Appserver usage, Presentation Technologies being used, Data Access Layer frameworks, Build and Release Systems, Application Frameworks, and many other aspects of running the site and developing eBay’s Java-based products. He’s been at eBay for more then 6 years.
Paul Querna
Senior Software Engineer, Bloglines
Paul Querna is employed as a Senior Software Engineer at Bloglines, where he works on the Bloglines distributed file system, custom BerkeleyDB based databases, and other backend systems. He is involved with many open source projects and is a member of the Apache Software Foundation. When he can find spare time, he likes to hack on the Apache HTTP Server and the Apache Portable Runtime projects.
Chad Walters
Search Architect and Director of Search Engineering, Powerset
Chad Walters is the Search Architect and Director of Search Engineering for Powerset, where he focuses on taking Powerset’s natural language search technology to web-scale. Before joining Powerset, Mr. Walters served as Websearch Architect for Yahoo!. In this role, he provided technical leadership spanning the Websearch organization with an emphasis on runtime query serving infrastructure. Mr. Walters also has expertise in online storage, virtual machines, and virtual memory. Prior to Yahoo!, Mr. Walters held leadership positions at i-drive.com/Anuvio Technologies and Connectix Corporation. He holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.
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It’s both a blessing and a curse—web startups work long hours building products that everyone loves only to face the threat of being killed by their own success.
This month, geekSessions tackles the topic of how to keep your web infrastructure alive and thriving when demand goes through the roof. We’ve put together a great panel of people who’ve experienced the “Hockey Stick” first hand and will come to share the lessons they’ve learned and answer your questions. Our speakers hail from Digg, Friendster, Meebo, and VideoEgg.
Join us on Tuesday, July 31st from 6 to 9 PM at the elegant City Club in downtown San Francisco. Come for the panel and stay for an informal catered reception to continue the discussion. Oh, and don’t forget—there’s an OPEN BAR!
Event Info
What: Web Infrastructure: Surviving the “Hockey Stick”
When: Tuesday, July 31st, 6:00-9:00pm
Where: The City Club of SF, Google Map: 155 Sansome, 11th Floor
How: A limited number of tickets are now open to the public! Get them while they last.
Transportation: Parking can be a bit tricky in the financial district at this time, so it’s highly recommended you take public transportation. If you must drive, your best bet may be to park in the parking structure for the Metreon over on 4th and Mission and walk to the event.
3 hours isn’t enough, you say? Stay tuned for details of the geekSessions after-party being organized by Sean Plaice of Yelp!
Submit a Question for the Panel
Got something you’re itching to ask? Use our form to submit a question for the panel. Selected questions will be asked by the moderator.
About the Panelists
Jonathan Abrams
Founder, Friendster and Socializr
Jonathan Abrams is the founder, CEO, and Junior Computer Programmer at Socializr, an online service for sharing event and party information with your friends. Jonathan is an award-winning serial entrepreneur who created the pioneering social networking service Friendster in 2002. Jonathan is the inventor of a United States Patent for a “System, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.
Nick Heyman
VP of Operations, VideoEgg
Nick Heyman has over a decade of IT experience, most recently at Facebook, one of the leading social networks in the US, where he was responsible for scaling the infrastructure of the site from 2 million to over 14 million users. He also worked in operations at another popular social network, Friendster. Nick started out his IT career in 1995 working for the Secretary of the State of Rhode Island where he helped build and launch one of the first web-based legislative tracking systems in the country.
Ron Gorodetzky
Senior Systems Administrator, Digg
Ron attended University of California San Diego after which he did small scale computer consulting. In 2004 he was asked to help administer a small server for a side project called Digg, a social news site. Soon after he co-founded and acted as Director of Technology for Revision3, an online production company and distributor. Both ventures have become quite successful in their own spaces.
Sandy Jen
Founder, meebo
With a BS in Computer Science from Stanford, Sandy founded meebo in 2005. Today, Meebo’s users exchange over 80 million instant messages a day! She is primarily responsible for the server side development of meebo. This includes coding up new features but also architecting a scalable, robust server infrastructure to interface with the front-end.
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Topic: Ruby on Rails: To Scale or Not to Scale
Where: The City Club
When: May 22nd, 6:00pm
Since hitting the ground two years ago, Ruby on Rails is sweeping the technology community by storm. However, critics note that Rails suffers from persistent problems with scalability, an issue that plagues the framework to this day.
Can Ruby surmount the scalability challenge? To set the record straight, we’re inviting three luminaries from the Rails community to speak on their experiences and answer questions from the audience. Our speakers hail from Twitter, Joyent, Sun, and Pivotal Labs, San Francisco’s fastest growing agile development studio.
Join us on May 22 from 6 to 9 PM at the elegant City Club in downtown San Francisco. Come for the panel, and stay for an informal catered reception (and open bar) to continue the discussion.
SOLD OUT!!! – COME TO THE NEXT EVENT IN JULY!
About the Panelists
Jeremy LaTrasse
Operations Lead, Twitter
Jeremy runs ops for twitter, he thinks an ideal future is one of utility computing from shipping containers, powered by renewable resources.
Ian McFarland
VP Technology, Pivotal Labs
Ian is one of the true old hands of Java development. He has been working with Java since version 1.0a2, and actually wrote the first client-server Java application ever: a demo seating reservation system used for the Java product announcement at SunWorld in 1995. At Pivotal Labs, Ian has displayed his versatility as an architect, project lead, engagement manager, and web technology expert. He is a frequent trainer and speaker on agile practices.
Jason Hoffman
CTO, Joyent
Jason Hoffman is the CTO of Joyent and was a co-founder, with Dean Allen, of TextDrive. Jason has a BS and MS from UCLA, a PhD from UCSD and has backgrounds in cancer biology, bioinformatics, grid computing and collaborative applications.
Bryan Cantrill
Distinguished Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Bryan Cantrill is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where
he has spent over a decade working on system software, from the guts of
the kernel to client-code on the browser and much in between. Along
with colleagues Mike Shapiro and Adam Leventhal, Bryan designed and
implemented DTrace, a facility for dynamic instrumentation of production
systems that won the Wall Street Journal’s top Technology Innovation Award
in 2006. In 2005, Bryan was named by MIT’s Technology Review as one of
the top thirty-five technologists under the age of thirty-five, and by
InfoWorld as one of their Innovators of the Year. Bryan received the
ScB magna cum laude with honors in Computer Science from Brown University.
More Info
Tickets for GeekSessions are made available to members of the GeekList, an invitation-only group of Silcon Valley’s foremost innovators, technologists, and influencers. In addition, we hold a limited number of tickets for sale to the general public.
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