I'm at QCon San Francisco this week.  (An aside: after being a speaker at No Fluff, Just Stuff, it's interesting to be the audience again.  As usual, on returning from travels in a different domain, one has a new perspective on familiar scenes.) This conference targets senior developers, architects, and project managers.  One of the very appealing things is the track on "Architectures you've always wondered about".  This coveres high-volume architectures for sites such as LinkedIn and eBay as well as other networked applications like Second Life.  These applications live and work in thin air, where traffic levels far outstrip most sites in the world.  Performance and scalability are two of my personal themes, so I'm very interested in learning from these pioneers about what happens when you've blown past the limits of traditional 3-tier, app-server centered architecture.

Through the remainder of the week, I'll be blogging five ideas, insights, or experiences from each day of the conference.