CloudFlare has been a big supporter of SXSW. This summer, when the Interactive, Film, and Music festival opened its Panel Picker for submissions, CloudFlare helped keep it online under the flood of ensuing traffic. A bunch of folks from team CloudFlare are headed to Austin. If you'll be there too, it'd be great to meet up. Shoot us a tweet (@cloudflare) or stop by one of the sessions our team will be participating in. Here are the four panels and talks our team is participating on.
Javascript Performance MythBusters™ (SXSW Details)
JavaScript is everywhere from mobile phones and tablets to e-readers and TVs. With such a wide range of supported environments developers are often looking for an easy way to compare the performance between snippets, browsers, and devices. jsPerf.com, a site for community driven JavaScript benchmarks, was created to help devs do just that.
Chris Joel (@robodynamo) from CloudFlare is joined by Mathias Bynens and John-David Dalton from jsPerf.com, and Lindsey Simon from Google/Browserscope in this panel discussion on some of the best dev-created benchmarks and most interesting practices debunked by real-world tests.
Scaling to Infinity: Dealing with Rocket Growth (SXSW Details)
It's every engineers dream to work on a company that becomes one of the top 10 largest sites online. This group of panelists have done just that. From Twitter to Facebook to Yahoo! - these engineers, tech operations, and cloud computing specialists have seen it all and will discuss what it's like to scale the largest infrastructures imaginable. This session will discuss what it takes for a team of engineers to scale to an Internet Giant, how it's done, and what the best practices are for making it happen.
Lee Holloway (@icqheretic), co-founder of CloudFlare, is joined by a powerhouse panel including Andrew Terng from Tumblr, Girish Patangay from Facebook, and Jeremy LaTrasse of Message Bus/Twitter. The panel is moderated by Jeremy Edberg, the former CEO of Reddit now responsible for cloud reliability at Netflix.
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Backwards in Heels (SXSW Details)
Ginger Rogers may have said it, but today's female entrepreneurs are proving it. Right now, women are starting and leading new and innovative companies at an unprecedented rate. From e-commerce to healthcare to Internet infrastructure, women are breaking new ground across all industries these days. But, why now? What are today's female entrepreneurs doing differently to build sustainable businesses and get the attention and credit they deserve? What unique struggles do they still contend with and what advice can they share with tomorrow's generation of female leaders? These questions and more will be addressed in this entertaining panel.
Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder of CloudFlare, is on a panel moderated by All Things Digital executive editor Kara Swisher and joined by Piya Sorcar, founder of TeachAIDS, and Victoria Ransom, founder of Wildfire Interactive.
Surviving Lulz: Behind the Scenes of LulzSec (SXSW Details)
On Thursday, June 2, 2011, LulzSecurity.com registered for CloudFlare. One hour after they registered, they published 3.5 million usernames and passwords allegedly stolen from Sony Pictures' website. For the next three weeks, LulzSec claimed to hack organizations ranging from the CIA, to the US Senate, to the Arizona Immigration Police. In the meantime, law enforcement, cyber vigilantes, and rival hackers worked to unmask LulzSec and launch major attacks of their own to knock LulzSecurity.com offline. CloudFlare watched it all from the heart of the crossfire.
I (@eastdakota) asked and received permission from LulzSec to tell exactly what it's like to be one of the most notorious hacking groups of all time and how to keep your site online when the whole world is trying to shut you down.