Build Systems that Drive Business
June 11–12, 2018: Training
June 12–14, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

About Velocity

Why attend | Experience Velocity | Who should attend | What people are saying | Program chairs | Committee members | Track Hosts | Ambassador Program

Modern systems pose a number of thorny challenges: they are inherently complex, span multiple technologies, groups, and sometimes different organizations altogether. Most poignantly, they fail in the most unexpected and spectacular ways. The O'Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place on the planet for web ops and systems engineering professionals like you to learn from your peers, exchange ideas with experts, and share best practices and lessons learned for handling modern systems and applications.

O'Reilly Velocity Expo O'Reilly Velocity Keynotes

Why attend

Build Secure, Resilient Systems
The O'Reilly Velocity Conference provides you with real-world best practices for building, deploying, and running complex, distributed applications and systems.

Quality Time with Experts
Take advantage of this rare opportunity to meet face-to-face with a cadre of industry leaders who are taking systems performance and operations to the next level. Bring your entire team to share ideas and get your toughest questions answered by the experts.

Four Days Devoted to Web Operations, DevOps, and Systems Engineering
Velocity packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into four concentrated days. You'll be able to apply what you've learned immediately and you'll be well prepared for what lies ahead.

Experience Velocity

O'Reilly Velocity Attendee Networking
  • Inspirational keynote presentations that bring clarity to complex issues and new perspectives on the state of the art
  • Immersive training courses and tutorials addressing critical topics and technologies
  • Two days of technical sessions covering both practical and emerging issues
  • An Exhibit Hall featuring dozens of the latest tools and products
  • Fun evening events, Topic Tables at lunch, and plenty of networking opportunities

Who should attend

O'Reilly Velocity Author Signing
  • Systems and site reliability engineers
  • Systems architects
  • Application developers
  • DevOps practitioners
  • Researchers and academics
  • Teams engaged in operations, infrastructure, and cloud ecosystems
  • CTOs and CIOs seeking to streamline operations

What people are saying about Velocity

The Velocity Conference is an excellent opportunity to learn about devops and new technologies being used today. Whether you are a rookie or a veteran in the devops world, you will meet some like-minded people who are all striving to solve complex problems in complex environments. I highly recommend attending the Velocity Conference."
—Jeremy Ramage, Shaw Communications Inc.
As a first-time attendee, I was really impressed by the variety of subject areas, technologies, and vendors. Whether you are in development, operations, product, or management, you will not only leave with more knowledge and exposure—you will leave inspired."
—Chris Halbert, Senior Web Engineer, Dominion Enterprises
This is a great conference to attend for any web app developer. Loved the quality of the content, the variety of topics, and awesome presenters. I will try to bring my whole team next year."
—Tom Hughes-Croucher, Yahoo! Developer Network Blog
I can say without hyperbole that this was the best conference I've attended. The presentations were from people doing real large-scale web development and included a fair amount of real data and some of their solutions to hard problems."
—robcee
I have attended Velocity for over six years now and still find the content to be incredibly valid to my daily work. In many ways, it prepares me for items and features we haven't even discovered yet."
—Don Shanks, Marchex
Velocity is the conference where people talk about how to get things done in the real world—if you want to know how the best in the world handle their operations, Velocity is the place to learn."
—Adam Jacob, Opscode

Program chairs

Nikki McDonald

Nikki McDonald

Nikki McDonald is a content director at O'Reilly Media where she writes, edits, and develops content to help engineers and developers collaborate more effectively and create and deploy complex distributed systems. She also co-chairs O'Reilly's Velocity conference, which is held annually in San Jose, New York, and London. Nikki started out as a features editor at MacUser magazine back when people were still dialing up to the Internet with AOL. She now works with the industry's leading practitioners to develop books, online courses, and video training for engineers, product managers, and developers. Nikki lives in Ann Arbor, MI.

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra

Ines Sombra is a distributed systems engineer at Fastly, where she spends her time helping the Web go faster. Ines holds an MS in computology with an emphasis on cheesy '80s rock ballads. She has a fondness for steak, fernet, and a pug named Gordo. In a previous life, Ines was a data engineer.

James Turnbull

James Turnbull

James Turnbull is a CTO in residence at Microsoft. A longtime member of the open source community, James is the author of 11 technical books about open source software. Previously, he was CTO at Empatico and Kickstarter, VPE of Venmo, and an adviser at Docker. James likes food, wine, books, photography, and cats. He is not overly keen on long walks on the beach or holding hands.

Committee Members

Kevin Burke (burke.services)Kevin Burke (burke.services) likes building great experiences. He helped scale Twilio and Shyp, and currently runs a software consultancy. Kevin once accidentally left Waiting for Godot at the intermission.

Nicole ForsgrenNicole Forsgren (DORA) is the CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA). Nicole is an IT impacts expert who is best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. In a previous life, she was a professor, sysadmin, and hardware performance analyst. Nicole has been awarded public and private research grants (funders include NASA and the NSF), and her work has been featured in various media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, and conferences. She holds a PhD in management information systems and a master's degree in accounting.

Elaine GreenbergElaine Greenberg (Fastly) is the senior communications manager at Fastly and co-organizer for Papers We Love SF. Trilingual in Russian, French, and English, Elaine holds a BA in neuroscience from Wellesley College. In her free time, she obsesses over dogs, textured neutrals, and well-arranged florals.

Tiffany JerniganTiffany Jernigan (Amazon) is a developer advocate at Amazon for containers on AWS. Previously she worked at Docker and Intel in software engineering and as a hardware engineer after graduating from Georgia Tech in Electrical Engineering. In the majority of her free time, she dabbles in photography and spends time with family and friends.

Arun KejariwalArun Kejariwal (MZ) is a statistical learning principal at Machine Zone (MZ), where he leads a team of top-tier researchers and works on research and development of novel techniques for install and click fraud detection and assessing the efficacy of TV campaigns and optimization of marketing campaigns. In addition, his team is building novel methods for bot detection, intrusion detection, and real-time anomaly detection. Previously, Arun worked at Twitter, where he developed and open-sourced techniques for anomaly detection and breakout detection. His research includes the development of practical and statistically rigorous techniques and methodologies to deliver high-performance, availability, and scalability in large-scale distributed clusters. Some of the techniques he helped develop have been presented at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals.

Bridget Kromhout (Pivotal)Bridget Kromhout (Microsoft ) is a Principal Cloud Developer Advocate. Her CS degree emphasis was in theory, but she now deals with the concrete (if 'cloud' can be considered tangible). After 15 years as an operations engineer, she traded being on call for being on a plane. A frequent speaker and program committee member for tech conferences, she leads the devopsdays organization globally and the devops community at home in Minneapolis. She podcasts with Arrested DevOps, blogs at Bridgetkromhout.com, and is active in a Twitterverse near you.

Edward MullerEdward Muller (Heroku) is the Engineering Manager of Heroku's Operational Experience team which focuses on helping customers understand how their Heroku apps are operating. During his career he has written open source and closed source software in several different programming languages, run an ISP, architected systems at a large financial company, owned a cyber cafe, and designed, installed and managed networks running all sorts of systems from Linux to Microsoft Windows to Novell Netware. He has spent the last 11 years working on PaaS systems with a focus on operations, logging and observability.

Devon O'DellDevon O'Dell (Google) is a recovering competitive Guitar Hero and Rock Band addict, but still occasionally enjoys rhythm games and jamming on guitar and drums. Today, he is a Senior Systems Engineer at Google. Prior to Google, Devon held software leadership positions at Fastly and Message Systems, implementing high performance and low latency network servers. His experience over the past 17 years ranges from web applications to embedded systems firmware (and most areas in-between). His primary technical interests are developing and debugging low-latency concurrent network systems software and related tools.

Herman RadtkeHerman Radtke (Nordstromrack.com) is a sociologist turned full stack engineer turned VP of Engineering at Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook. He designed and built much of the original hypermedia API that drives the website and mobile applications. When not managing people, Herman hacks on Rust and leads the Rust Los Angeles user group. Outside of technology, he spends his time crafting pale ale homebrews.

Alex RasmussenAlex Rasmussen (Freenome) is the VP of Engineering at Freenome, a startup developing software to combat cancer and other age-related diseases. He holds a Ph.D. from University of California San Diego, where his dissertation focused on highly-efficient large scale data processing systems. While at UCSD, he led the TritonSort project, which set several world records in large scale sorting.

Casey RosenthalCasey Rosenthal (Backplane) is a CTO, executive manager and senior architect. He manages teams to tackle Big Data, architect solutions to difficult problems, and trains others to do the same. He seeks opportunities to leverage his experience with distributed systems, artificial intelligence, translating novel algorithms and academia into working models, and selling a vision of the possible to clients and colleagues alike. For fun, Casey models human behavior using personality profiles in Ruby, Erlang, Elixir, Prolog, and Scala.

Baron Schwartz (VividCortex)Baron Schwartz (VividCortex) is founder and CEO of VividCortex, the best way to see what your production database servers are doing. He is the lead author of High Performance MySQL and a variety of open-source software.

Kerim SatirliKerim Satirli (Method) is part of a team of engineers and helps the company by stewarding the adoption and expansion of DevOps techniques and practices. In the past, Kerim built web applications for advertising companies, worked on a content management system that was used by the top museums of the Netherlands and helped make music and video more accessible for a number of start-ups.

Melinda ShoreMelinda Shore (Fastly) is a Principal Security Systems Architect with Fastly, and has been heavily involved with network protocol development and standardization in the IETF and elsewhere, with published RFCs, a few patents, and a number of publications. Melinda lives with a team of Siberian Huskies in Two Rivers, Alaska (home to the best dog mushing on earth!), is a serious fly angler and fly tyer, and enjoys doing pretty much anything outdoors.

Cindy SridharanCindy Sridharan (Apple) is a distributed systems engineer at Apple. Previously, she was an engineer at imgix, where she worked on API development, infrastructure, and other miscellaneous backend engineering tasks. She likes thinking about building resilient and maintainable systems and recently started writing about several of these topics.

Nathan TaylorNathan Taylor (Fauna) is an Oakland-based software developer. He has hacked on low-level systems software such as the Twitter Java runtime and the Xen virtual machine monitor. Originally a Trombone major, he holds an M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, where he researched full-system binary rewriting and dynamic analysis systems. When not in front of a computer, you're likely to find him either baking bread or suffering cycling up a steep hill.

Erica WindischErica Windisch (IOpipe) has over 16 years of experience designing and building cloud infrastructure management solutions. She was an early and long-time contributor to OpenStack and a maintainer of the Docker project. Presently, Windisch is founder and CTO of IOpipe, bringing decades of experience in building operational tooling to serverless developers.

Dean WilsonDean Wilson (GOV.UK) is a Web Operations engineer at GOV.UK where he spends his time helping to build and promote digital Government. He was originally a software developer but has spent the last decade performing large scale operations at a number of well-known companies including Net-a-Porter and Mozilla. Dean occasionally blogs at https://www.unixdaemon.net, provides technical publication and architecture reviews and can often be found in the quiet back corner at London technical events.

Track Hosts

Monitoring and Observability

Cindy Sridharan (imgix)Cindy Sridharan (Apple) is a distributed systems engineer at Apple. Previously, she was an engineer at imgix, where she worked on API development, infrastructure, and other miscellaneous backend engineering tasks. She likes thinking about building resilient and maintainable systems and recently started writing about several of these topics.

Leadership

Herman Radtke (Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook)Herman Radtke (Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook) is a sociologist turned full stack engineer turned VP of Engineering at Nordstromrack.com | HauteLook. He designed and built much of the original hypermedia API that drives the website and mobile applications. When not managing people, Herman hacks on Rust and leads the Rust Los Angeles user group. Outside of technology, he spends his time crafting pale ale home brews.

Distributed Data

Nathan Taylor (Fauna)Nathan Taylor (Fauna) is an Oakland-based software developer currently building globally-consistent transactional databases at Fauna. Previously, he has hacked on low-level systems software such as the Twitter Java runtime and the Xen virtual machine monitor. Originally a Trombone major, he holds an M.Sc. from the University of British Columbia, where he researched full-system binary rewriting and dynamic analysis systems. When not in front of a computer, you’re likely to find him either baking bread or suffering cycling up a steep hill.

Production Engineering, SRE, and DevOps

Kerim Seterili (Method)Kerim Seterili (Method) is part of a team of engineers and helps the company by stewarding the adoption and expansion of DevOps techniques and practices. In the past, Kerim built web applications for advertising companies, worked on a content management system that was used by the top museums of the Netherlands and helped make music and video more accessible for a number of start-ups.

Building Secure Systems

Kevin Burke (burke.services)Kevin Burke (burke.services) likes building great experiences. He helped scale Twilio and Shyp and currently runs a software consultancy. Kevin once accidentally left Waiting for Godot at the intermission.

Kubernetes

Lachlan Evenson (Microsoft)Lachlan Evenson (Microsoft) is a Principal Program Manager on the Azure Containers team. He has spent the last two and a half years working with Kubernetes and enabling Cloud Native journeys. Lachie serves as a Cloud Native ambassador and TOC contributor and has deep operational knowledge of many Cloud Native projects.evenson

Systems Engineering & Architecture

Kiran Bhattaram (Stripe)Kiran Bhattaram (Stripe) is an engineer on the observability team at Stripe. She has previously written code for the New York Times, LinkedIn, and MIT CSAIL. In her spare time, Kiran enjoys making things, whether tinkering with circuits, sewing dresses, or woodworking.

Distributed Systems

Emily Shea (Fastly)Emily Shea (Fastly) is a Senior Software Engineer at Fastly, where she works on the platform for delivering core CDN configurations, and writes Perl. In a past life, she worked in HR at mobile gaming companies. Emily holds a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley, and in her spare time likes to hang out in parks with her dog, named Chicken.

Serverless

Mike Roberts (Fastly)Mike Roberts (Symphonia) is an engineering leader and cofounder of Symphonia, a serverless and cloud technology consultancy. Mike is a longtime proponent of Agile and DevOps values and is excited by the role that cloud technologies have played in enabling such values for many high-functioning software teams. He sees serverless architectures as the next technological evolution of cloud systems and is optimistic about their ability to help teams be awesome. Mike can be reached at mike@symphonia.io.

Velocity + Fluent Ambassador Program

Thank you to our ambassadors, who have partnered with O’Reilly to raise awareness about the Velocity + Fluent conferences in their communities.

Tammy Butow

Tammy Butow (Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Gremlin)

Tammy works on chaos engineering at Gremlin—the facilitation of controlled experiments to identify systemic weaknesses. Gremlin helps engineers build resilient systems using their control plane and API. Previously, Tammy led SRE teams at Dropbox responsible for the databases and storage systems used by over 500 million customers and was an IMOC (incident manager on call), where she was responsible for managing and resolving high severity incidents across the company. She has also worked in infrastructure engineering, security engineering, and product engineering. Tammy is the cofounder of Girl Geek Academy, a global movement to teach one million women technical skills by 2025. Tammy is an Australian and enjoys riding bikes, skateboarding, snowboarding, and surfing. She also loves mosh pits, crowd surfing, metal, and hardcore punk.

Jessica DeVita

Jessica DeVita (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft)

Jessica is a senior program manager For Visual Studio Team Services at Microsoft.

Stephen Fluin

Stephen Fluin (Developer Advocate, Google)

Stephen works to solve real-world problems faced by developers and businesses and represent the needs of the community within the Angular team.

Nicole Forsgren

Nicole Forsgren (Director, DORA)

Nicole is an IT impacts expert who is best known for her work with tech professionals and as the lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She is a consultant, expert, and researcher in knowledge management, IT adoption and impacts, and DevOps. In a previous life, she was a professor, sysadmin, and hardware performance analyst. Nicole has been awarded public and private research grants (funders include NASA and the NSF), and her work has been featured in various media outlets, peer-reviewed journals, and conferences. She holds a PhD in management information systems and a master’s degree in accounting.

Rachel Myers

Rachel Myers (Developer Program Engineer, Google)

Rachel is a backend engineer at Google working on Firebase rules. Previously, she was an engineer at GitHub and ModCloth and founded Opsolutely. In her free time, she designs enamel pins.

Volkan Özcelik

Volkan Özcelik (Technical Lead, Cisco Systems)

Volkan has been in the industry since 2003, which means that when he began his career, JavaScript was a “toy language” for online form validation, AJAX was just a detergent, and he had to deal with monsters called Netscape Navigator 4 and Internet Explorer 5. He believes in the beauty of simplicity and loves to architect responsive and intuitive user interfaces driven by amazingly well-organized JavaScript code. Volkan would be happy to talk with you about performance engineering, widgets, APIs, microservices, and, of course, JavaScript.

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