An interesting first day at the conference – starting with a full day session by Cal Henderson from Flickr. Cal covered lots of Tips n’ Tricks – from MySQL replication to load balancing. Very insightful to hear how the Flickr crew cut corners to save money as they grew the service. Apparently the service today has capacity for 600TB. Overall Cal was an above average speaker, even though much of his presentation would best appeal to a system administrator. His ability to handle any question thrown out by the audience was impressive. Great to see a Canadian ‘Web 2.0′ success story here at Etech.

Cal mentioned a few things that surprised me about Flickr:

• No formal QA resources, the dev team performed testing. I’ll love to take this nugget back to my current dev team ;>
• Releases frequently throughout the day (every 30 minutes – now that’s Agile). Enabled by a fully automated deployment process – the one big button. Looks like they created something in house, similar to Rails Switchtower but for PHP.
• Non-federated databases up until the Yahoo acquisition. They pushed MySQL beyond what I thought it was capable of.
• Staffing remains below 15 even up to today.

On to the keynotes – I’d never heard Tim O’Reilly speak before – he was entertaining and charismatic, encouraging the audience to ‘keep hacking’. It’s too bad he ran short on time, I’d like to have heard more from him.

I found Bruce Sterling to be the most thought provoking of the day – his keynote on the ‘Internet of Things‘ left me pondering on how change and new thinking moves its way through our culture. He definately has given me a perspective I hadn’t had until today. I’ll have to grab a copy of his latest book when the conference is over.

Looks like it will be a very inspiring week.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve never seen so many Apple notebooks – at first I thought it was a prerequisite to attendance that I missed ;> Early pet peeve is lack of seating in the conference foyers, people wanting to sit around and login are having to sprawl out on the floor.

Check out the Flickr event photo stream when you have a chance.