Why We Started the Velocity Conference
Tim O'Reilly · · Article
Tim O'Reilly's retrospective on the origins of the Velocity Conference explains why the event was launched and how web operations emerged as a strategic discipline, with Jesse Robbins as co-founder and conference chair.
Tim O’Reilly describes how Jesse Robbins, Steve Souders, and Andy Oram approached him at the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention with a message: “We need a separate conference for our community” — the web operations professionals who keep sites up and running.
From the article:
A group of web operations professionals, led by Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders along with O’Reilly editor Andy Oram, asked for a meeting with me. Their message: “We need a separate conference for our community.” That community: the web operations professionals who keep sites up and running.
The meeting felt like an intervention. It was absurdly exciting. I had been thinking in the abstract about the fact that as we move to a software as a service world, one of the big changes was that applications had people “inside” of them, managing them, tuning them, and helping them respond to constantly changing conditions.
We agreed to start with a “Summit” meeting to bring together the community and brainstorm ideas. Gina Blaber, our VP of Conferences, organized a meeting of 30 or 40 of the “big dogs”, and the excitement was palpable. She moved quickly on from there to launch the Velocity conference.