Signals from the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in New York

Key insights from DevOps, Web operations, and performance.

People from across the Web operations and performance worlds are coming together this week for the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in New York. Below, we’ve assembled notable keynotes, interviews, and insights from the event.

Diversity and bias

Bryan Liles, who works on strategic initiatives for DigitalOcean, gave a great thought-provoking talk on bias and diversity. “If your company is creating a diversity plan and you’ve actually gone and counted people,” Liles said, “you’ve already lost.”


Scaling digital initiatives for good

Lisa Gelobter, chief digital service officer at the U.S. Department of Education, outlined the growing initiatives in the U.S. government’s digital coalition. “It’s an independent set of organizations that work together collaboratively,” she explained. “We’re aligned to use digital services and technologies to improve the way government serves the American people — not just at a broad level, but at an individual level.


Internet reliability

Rob Peters, CTO for Verizon Digital Media Services, talked about how the Internet is becoming a “foundational technology” — technology that is so pervasive and reliable, that “normal” people don’t even know it’s there; it just works, much like utilities. But can we put the Internet in that “just works” category yet? “Not so much,” said Peters.


Appropriate technology

Dylan Richard, founder and CTO of Modest, offered a humorous and humble talk on choosing the appropriate technology for the problem you’re trying to solve — and what happens when you don’t. “It’s not necessarily about using the most advanced technology, but instead, about using that technology to help build on top of solutions that already work and make them work better,” he said. “It’s about using a shovel when you need a shovel, even if you have an excavator.”


A culture of continuous learning

Jeff Gothelf, principal at Neo Innovation, talked about creating a culture of continuous learning. “Getting the bits out the door used to mean done,” he said. “Getting the bits out the door today is simply the beginning of the conversation — now, the hard part of product development begins, now the optimization has to start, the learning, and the iteration.”


You can see more keynotes and interviews in the 2015 O’Reilly Velocity Conference in New York playlist.

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