Innovation in open source, caching strategies, and more takeaways from OSCON 2015
O'Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) is always exciting. It’s easy to feel the collaborative, open source spirit throughout the conference and the events surrounding it. This year, our team traveled to Portland, Oregon to talk shop about all things web performance.
The expo floor opened on the evening of Tuesday, June 21. On Wednesday, we watched an excellent keynote from Hadley Beeman of The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) about how “making things open” leads to increased innovation. James Pearce, Facebook's open source lead (and the winner of last year’s open source trivia challenge), also gave an interesting talk about best practices for making open source products scale.
Later that day, Fastly engineer Michael May took the stage (“Tips for going fast in a slow world”) to talk about caching strategies, his impatience to load cat gifs, and what it would be like to run a web server on the New Horizons space probe. His presentation covered HTTP caching, old and new strategies for caching "uncacheable" content, and features of HTTP accelerators like Varnish. Check out the slides below:
Other talks we loved:
Bryan Cantrill’s “Leaping the chasm from proprietary to open: A survivor's guide”
Amy Boyle’s “Data transformation superpowers with digital signal processing”
Jesse Toth and Nathan Witmer’s “Refactoring systems with confidence”
It’s been an honor to be apart of the OSCON tradition — we’ve sponsored OSCON for the past four years, and it’s been heartening to watch both the open source community and conference grow larger each year. For a more in-depth overview, head over to O’Reilly’s Radar blog.
Fastly’s ties to the open source community run deep, and we love giving back and meeting the people behind the code. Our engineers regularly contribute to Varnish, Chef, Ganglia, Memcached, Perl, and many other leading open source initiatives. Check out a full list of the open source projects we’re currently supporting. You can also see Fastly’s open source libraries on our API clients page.
If you’re interested in learning more about our open source community, email community@fastly.com.
