Tom Lianza WishListing

The talk is going to center on using YSlow to evaluate the client-side performance of a website. Because it’s largely frontend-oriented, the majority of the content is applicable to any website, regardless of back-end technology. However, there will be Ruby on Rails-specific tips where appropriate. The major topics of the talk will be:

• What YSlow is, how you use it, and what it does for you
• How browser caching works - the Expires header, Etags, and Conditional GETs
• Simple compression techniques for minimizing bandwidth usage
• Strategies for optimizing HTTP requests
• Techniques for modifying web page structure to improve performance

Tom Lianza is the co-founder and lead developer of WishListing, a store-independent gift registry built in Ruby on Rails. Tom has been an engineer at F5 Networks in Seattle for the last 2 years, working on the user interface for the BIG-IP. Before that he was an engineer at Cisco Systems in Boxborough, MA for 5 years, leading a team responsible for the web-based reporting component of Cisco’s call center products. He loves all things internet-related, and is never far from an RSS reader. Tom holds a Masters Degree in Information Systems with a specialization in Electronic Commerce from Carnegie Mellon University.

Mark Maunder, FeedJit

Some of the topics that Mark will cover in his talk:

• Early stage and longer term scaling strategies.
• Scaling vertically vs scaling horizontally.
• Hardware and hosting costs and - what can one box handle?
• The importance of scaling without service interruption.
• How to deal with DoS attacks and content leechers.
• When database engines aren’t fast enough. Apache config tips.
• Operational efficiency and your cash flow as a competitive advantage.

Born and raised in South Africa I’ve been a geek since meeting an Apple 2e at age 12. I spent some time in the Comp Sci faculty at the University of Cape Town and spent 3 years working in South Africa for De Beers among others. I moved to London at age 23 and spent 5 years consulting there as a systems engineer and developer for Coca Cola, Credit Suisse, The BBC, RedHat and eToys.com. I moved to the US in 2003 and founded WorkZoo.com, a vertical search engine. WorkZoo was named one of Time Mag’s top 50 websites of 2005 and sold to Jobster.com that same year. Since then I’ve founded Geojoey.com, LineBuzz.com and recently (and most successfully) FeedJit, a live traffic and map widget for bloggers. Feedjit is used by over 5000 bloggers in over 100 countries and serves almost 2 million widgets every day.

Galen Ward & Doug Cole, Estately

An overview of Geographical Information System (GIS) fundamentals, incorporating GIS into SQL queries with the PostGIS extension to Postgres, and (if we have time!) using GeoRuby to work within PostGIS. Some of the points we will cover:

• Store points, lines and polygons in Postgres to perform complex queries
• Determine the distance between two points
• Find N points within a given radius or polygon
• Answer questions like: which points exist within a given zip code or within 2 miles of a zip code? Which cities are adjacent to other cities?

Galen Ward is the co-founder of Estately.com, a Washington State-based real estate search website. Before founding Estately, Galen worked as a GIS consultant and most recently assisted the EPA’s Hurricane Katrina cleanup efforts in New Orleans. Doug Cole is the co-founder of Estately.com. Before founding Estately, Doug worked as a consultant building web applications. Doug quit a graduate program in electrical engineering to start Estately. Estately, previously ShackPrices.com, is a two person real estate search site where home buyers and browsers can quickly and intuitively search through tens of thousands of homes for sale on a map, view precise details about each home, and see what parks, schools, restaurants, transit stops and more are near each home. Estately Agent Match is a local pre-screened real estate agent recommendation engine which helps home buyers and sellers find great local agents.