Speaking at Velocity next week

Don MacAskill — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:43:04 +0000

I’m thrilled that O’Reilly is putting on a great performance and operations conference, so I’m especially happy to be speaking there. I’m on a great-sounding panel, Success: A Survival Guide. I’m sure you’ll hear about our first few years where, like clockwork on the same days each year, we got massively hammered with traffic and what we did to handle it.

If you’re going to the conference, come say “Hi!”. I’ll be wearing a red SmugMug hat, as always.

Oh, and if you haven’t signed up yet, use ‘vel08js’ to get a nice discount.

My conference schedule for the rest of 2008

Don MacAskill — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:17:00 +0000

A few of you have been asking when/where I’ll be this year, conference-wise. Since Audrey was born, I’ve tried to keep my travel and speaking gigs to a bare minimum so I could help with my three kids and keep my wife sane. If you’d like me to speak or otherwise help out your conference this year, being local (Silicon Valley) is almost your only bet, I’m afraid.

That being said, there are a few things that are ‘must attend’ for me, and a few local California shows, too. I’m sorry if I had to turn down your conference this year, but please ask again in future years – especially those of you with foreign events.

Here’s what’s on my calendar so far:

MySQL User’s Conference – A must-attend for me. Helps that it’s local, too.
D6 – A must-attend for me. Best business conference there is, imho.
foo camp – Must-attend *if* I’m lucky enough to get an invite. No hard feelings if I don’t.
Velocity – New conference around operations & scalability (finally!). Local, too.
Web2Open – Speaking on a business hacks session. Local, too.

I wish I could go to OSCON this year, and wish I could have gone to ETech, too, but I just can’t & couldn’t.

And while I have your attention, I’d just like the mourn the death of the Web 2.0 Summit for me. I’ve enjoyed going all the previous years, but I just really didn’t get anything out of it last year. It’s turned into a massively popular event, but one that’s mobbed with VCs and bankers – almost no startups or entrepreneurs to be found. I have nothing against VCs or bankers, but that’s just not why I attended. So I think I’ll pass this year. Might come up to the city to hang out or get lunch, though, so ping me if you’re in town then.

If you are an entrepreneur with a hot startup, I suspect TechCrunch50 is going to be the place to be this year, btw. Get your demos ready!

UPDATE: Jesse just posted a 20% discount code in the comments: vel08js Thanks Jesse!

SmugBlog: Don MacAskill » conferences

Speaking at Velocity next week

My conference schedule for the rest of 2008