With over 150 confirmed tickets sold, this event is SOLD OUT. Podcasts of the event will be available in the Past Events section later this week.

If you can’t make it in person you can still Submit a question for the panel and then watch the podcasts.

As always, thanks to everyone for helping us get the word out. We’re looking forward to a great event!

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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The next session will address how to survive that wonderful problem of having your traffic, users, queries, hits, etc. increase exponentially or “hockey stick” as the popularity of the site rises. We’re bringing in a few heavy hitters who have been there and lived to tell the tale from some of the biggest sites around.

Due to the popularity of the last event we are investigating a larger venue. Details to follow shortly… stay tuned!

This just in: geekSessions May 22nd event is totally sold out! We’re completely booked, and with over 150 seats confirmed, we’re down to standing room capacity.

Thanks to everyone who gave their support and helped spread the word. Here’s to a great event!

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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