HTTP Caching Talk at RailsConf '09

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.

Hope to see you there.

UPDATE: I wasn't able to deliver on the advanced stuff due to time constraints but I think the talk went okay. Huge thanks to everyone that attended and here's the slides for those that weren't able to make it.