[This article was written by Maria Eldridge]

This year’s Velocity Santa Clara is shaping up to be one of the biggest yet, including speaking sessions with industry leaders and exhibits by companies who have evolved into household names. Each Velocity conference is preceded by the excitement and anticipation surrounding the events of each day, which is why it’s important to have an idea of which sessions and events you want to attend before you get swept up in the buzz of Day One.

Fortunately, we’ve already done the legwork and created a to-do list highlighting this year’s must-sees, as well as some fun extracurricular activities for you to enjoy.

Wednesday:

Making DevOps a Business Differentiator

Mehdi Daoudi, CEO & co-founder of Catchpoint Systems, Inc.

10:05 AM

“Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint Systems, will show how a business can use their DevOps initiatives to increase their user base and grow their revenue streams. On top of that, he’ll show how to optimize your costs by saving time and money through improved efficiency.”

What You Should Know About Email Authentication

Kurt Andersen, Site Reliability Engineer, LinkedIn

11:00 AM

“This tutorial will help you know what to require of vendors or to implement in your own systems to ensure that you can effectively deliver your message to your end users—reliably, safely, and while protecting your brand identity.”

Thursday:

Lessons Learned for Large-Scale Apps Running in a Hybrid Cloud Environment- Intuit’s Journey

Dana Quinn, Director of App Ops, Intuit, Inc.

9:45 AM

“Dana will share three major lessons he’s learned as Intuit adopted a hybrid cloud environment, with some workloads shifting to the public cloud while others stayed on their internal servers.”

Not Your Parents’ Microsoft

Jessive DeVita, Microsoft, & Jennelle Crothers, Microsoft

10:45 AM

“Forty years ago, a new startup named Microsoft changed the world of personal computing software. Today, Microsoft is behaving like the biggest startup on the planet. Jessica and Jennelle will show you how Microsoft, a force in the market for four decades, continues to innovate and reinvent itself on a massive scale.”

Event hosted by Instart Logic

6:45 PM

“We’re celebrating our company’s high velocity, Silicon Valley style! Join us at the Hyatt’s TusCA Courtyard for some fun, cocktails, and music with your fellow technologists. There will be an abundance of t-shirts and food too. You could be the one who wins a DJI Phantom 3 drone, so don’t miss out!”

Friday:

Twenty Thousands Leagues Inside the Optical Fiber

Ariya Hidayat, Shape Security

10:05 AM

“This talk will cover topics including how to trap photons inside a hair-thin strand of glass, modulate them to carry useful information in 40 different wavelengths, force the photons to travel thousands of miles, and finally stitch back the bits and pieces for full reassembly.”

PHP 7

Rasmus Lerdorf, Etsy

4:10 PM

“PHP 7 will be released later this year, and it is all about performance, while maintaining the robust process-based architecture of previous versions. It features a re-written AST-based engine which uses less memory and runs most existing PHP apps 2-3x(!) faster than PHP 5.×. Rasmus will cover the new features, display interesting graphs, and walk through potential BC breaks that you might hit in migrating your code to PHP 7.”

Be sure to stop by Catchpoint’s booth on May 28 and 29; we’ll be hosting a live version of the Ultimate Speed Geek Challenge, so you can put your web performance expertise up against the rest of the conference attendees for the chance to win some really cool prizes.