I'm doing a talk on HTTP caching at this year’s RailsConf
in Vegas, bright and early (9:45 AM), on the last day of the
conference. I'm assuming you’ll be tired after a week’s worth of
hard nights and depressed having lost all your money, but come by
anyway.
I've had ideas for a killer general introduction to modern HTTP
caching for years but was hesitant to give it since the set of
available gateway caches (Squid, basically) were not what I'd
consider practical for the audience I wanted to target
(all ruby web developers). A lot has changed within the past
year: Rack::Cache was released, Heroku put a high
performance gateway cache / accelerator in front of every
app, most web frameworks provide utilities for basic HTTP
caching stuff, Apache’s mod_cache is much improved, Varnish is
seeing a lot of adoption — it’s time to start talking about
this stuff.
And even more has happened in the months since I submitted my
original proposal. I caught a recording of the RailsEnvy
guys’s acts_as_conference 09 presentation, wherein Gregg
Pollack utterly nails a huge portion of what I'd hoped to speak
about. He followed that up with a highly polished screencast (if
you can call it a “screencast” — he uses a goddam green screen)
on Advanced HTTP Caching, which is more or less the talk
I planned to give at RailsConf.
So I've decided to take all of this as an opportunity and am shifting my talk around to explore some of the more advanced and experimental stuff people are doing with HTTP caching. Not everything is worked out yet but I'm happy with the direction and excited at the prospect of having an audience for some of these ideas sooner than later. I still plan to run through the basics but quickly, and only enough to set up the latter part of the presentation. I strongly recommended watching Gregg’s piece if you plan on attending.
Previous Topic
