Last week I was in Baltimore for the inaugural edition of Surge, a conference organized by OmniTI. Ever since I signed up for Surge2010, I sow this as a conference of Velocity quality, only without the frontend track and focusing mostly on backend topics (what I was interested anyway), and in a much more distant location than Santa Clara . This sounded interesting enough to make me want to go, as the first conference I will go in 2010 outside Silicon Valley. Also I could not pass the opportunity to hang out with my friend Andy and sync’up with what we’ve been up to during all this time.

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Being part of the LISA’10 Blog Team, I was lucky to be able to interview Rudi van Drunen, this year program chair. This was a great discussion where I got an idea on what goes behind the scenes when putting on such a big event as LISA’10. The article with the full interview is available on the USENIX Blog: “What can we expect from LISA’10?”

Also, my colleges from the LISA’10 blogging team, have done some very interesting interviews with Anne Dickison about marketing LISA’10 (by Ben Cotton) and Alan Clegg about his DNSSEC tutorial (by Matt Simmons).

Here are the slides from my presentation about Chef at the SF Bay Area Large-Scale Production Engineering meetup group. Accordingly to the organizers from Yahoo, there were 90 people present. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area and passionate about infrastructure you should definitely join this group. Highly recommended!

As Matt Simmons announced on his blog, I’ll be one of the members of the LISA2010 blogging team. I’m really excited to be part of such a great team with Matt, Matthew and Ben, and looking forward for a great event. We will be blogging and sharing things we find interesting at LISA on the USENIX blog, that you should definitely bookmark it in case you don’t have it already. If you will be at LISA2010 definitely come say hi; I’d love to meetup and chat.

Matt’s full announcement on the USENIX blog: Introducing the 2010 LISA Blogging Team

O’Reilly’s Velocity conference is THE place you want to be if you are in the Web ops and performance field. This is the third year of the conference started by Steve Souders and Jesse Robbins and it is the place where all the important people in the field gather once a year. This is my first year I’ll be able to attend Velocityconf live here in Santa Clara and I’m very excited about it.

Anyone not able to attend Velocity live can still learn a lot of what’s going on by watching the keynotes that will be streamed live and made available later on demand. Being here, I’ll try to come up with some short blog post on what I found interesting and think might be valuable for the readers of my blog. If you are interested in something in particular ping me on twitter or send me an email, and if possible I’ll try to attend and write about it.

Today is a full workshop day and I’ll be attending some very interesting ones: “Scalable Internet Architectures”, “Cassandra Workshop”, “Infrastructure Automation with Chef” and “Cloud Security: It Ain’t All Fluffy and Blue Sky Out There!”. It should be a great day with many interesting talks, and later in the evening some cool BoFs and Ignite Sessions.