One Day Workshop

Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget - How We Built Flickr

Web development advice from Flickr's Lead Developer

A one-day practical workshop that will give you everything you need to build a powerful enterprise-level web application on a small budget.

Event Photo

This is a unique opportunity to learn from one of the best web developers in the industry. Our one-day, intensive practical workshop is taught by Cal Henderson, the senior developer of the world-famous flickr.com. Flickr is a next-generation online photo management and sharing application. It currently has over 50 million photos with 400,000 being added every day.

The workshop will focus on topics that have real, practical "rubber-meets-the-road" value. It will cover everything that most developers wish they'd known before tackling a huge professional web application. It will be a lot of information to take in but it's all stuff you need to know if you're serious about building an enterprise level web application.

If you have any questions or prefer to pay by credit card over the phone, just email .

What You'll Walk Away With

The Survival Kit: - Each attendee will receive this amazing kit, which is chock-full of practical examples of code that Cal uses everyday. We'll also be placing valuable tools on the disc as well!
Years of Experience: - Best Practice Advice. The kit also includes Cal's advice on best practice and the full presentation from the day.
Practical Knowledge: - We're not going to bore you with theory. You will receive practical Rails training that focuses on what you need to start using Rails immediately.
30% off Pearson Books: - Just go to our special discount bookstore

Who should attend?

Web developers who have an intermediate level knowledge of LAMP development
More advanced web developers who want to make sure they are using the correct methods

Past Reviews

"It was great meeting other quality developers." - Ryan King, Technorati

"I gained tons of practical advice like how to scale your infrastructure. All valuable hands-on stuff." - Henrik Petersen, MTV

"Comparing Flickr’s architecture to our own gave us some really great ideas." - Richard Keen, Multimap

"It was great to get confirmation that other big players are using the same approaches as us!" - Erki Esken, Skype

"Cal is a very knowledgeable speaker. Thanks!" - Farai Madzima, Specialmoves

"Easily the best workshop that I've attended." - John Pilbeam

"The Survival Kit was really helpful." - Paula Davies, Legal and General

"Getting into the nitty-gritty details and the reasons behind some of Flickr’s decisions was invaluable." - John Hornbaker, software architect

"A day well spent." - Anthony Ribot, FuturePlatforms

"Well paced, well planned and very professionally delivered." - Mike Buzzard, Cuban Council

"The workshop was extremely useful and well organised. A great day, thanks!" - Duncan Ponting, BBC

"The Q&A section was the most valuable aspect of the workshop" - Mark Francis, Yahoo!

"Now I know how massive applications like Flickr really work - for us it’s the most valuable thing." - Kieran Bowler, Sequence.co.uk

How large is the workshop?

We've limited the number of attendees to 50, so that you will be able to interact with the speaker and get your questions answered.

Schedule

Registration & Coffee: 8:15 - 9:00am

Flickr Overview

Hardware architecture
Software architecture
Technology overview

Development Environments

The Ten Rules
Development platforms
Release management
Build tools
Source control

Coffee Break: 10:30 - 10:45

Unicode

Unicode 101
UTF-8 and PHP
UTF-8 and MySQL
UTF-8 and JavaScript
UTF-8 and humans (APIs)

Data Integrity

Filtering control characters
Filtering UTF-8
Filtering (X)HTML

Dealing with Email

Parsing mime
Parsing uuencoded attachments
Parsing tnef
Degrading gracefully
The wrath of wireless carriers
Character sets and encodings

Lunch is provided: 12:30 - 14:00

Talking to Other Services

Sockety stuff (storage mastr)
HTTP stuff (blogs, etc)

Blogging

Blogging APIs
Expecting to fail

Bottlenecks

Identifying & solving

Scaling 101

Database
File IO
Network IO
Application specific (image processing)

Scaling PHP

Shared nothing
Opcode caching

Scaling MySQL

Indexing
Joins are bad (normalised data is for sissies)
Example: searching
Hardware (memory, CPU, IO, disc cache, RAID, direct attached)
Replication (simple, master / master, trees)
Specialist slave
Partitioning

Coffee Break: 15:30 - 15:45

Scaling Storage

NFS
SFTP
FS API

Monitoring

Spread / stats
Ganglia / tracking
Nagios / alerts

Feeds

RSS / RDF/ Atom
Authentication

Flickr API

Transports
Shitty coders
API keys
Caching

Q & A: 17:30 - 18:00

Social: 18:30 - till late

Who's speaking?

Cal Henderson

Cal Henderson says he's been a web applications developer for far too long and thinks he should really start looking for a serious job.

Originally from London, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc, makers of Flickr, in Sunnyvale, California. He's been working on Flickr from day one (on his laptop) to the present day (where it's now the "Official web site of the Internet").

Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes Windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security. And writes biographies in the third person.

Partners

Questions?

E-mail us:

or give us a call at: 914-629-1405