Veteran Pivot David Stevenson gives his thoughts on the when, why, and how of performance optimization in Rails. He touches on a few of the approaches that make sense and the best tools for each approach.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

We’ve all seen the power of cheap cloud-hosting, open source software, and incubators to make building a web app dirt cheap, but now the same thing is happening in the world of hardware. The means of production is becoming democratized and product designers are becoming like web developers – agile hardware startups are now popping up to solve our problems IRL. Nick Pinkston of CloudFab describes the vision and also the hardware landscape globally and locally in the Bay Area.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Autoscale is a controversial topic. For many applications, autoscale will never be the fire and forget setup we might hope for, but it also shouldn’t require a fancy Platform-as-a-Service. In this talk, Jesse Proudman of the Blue Box Group shows how to combine the New Relic API with the Fog gem to build your own autoscale system using any cloud infrastructure.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Joseph Ruscio, Co-founder and CTO of Librato, demonstrates Silverline, their new service providing application-centric monitoring and active workload management. He describes with real-world examples how Silverline improves capacity planning, continuous deployment, root-cause analysis, automated alerting/resolution, and protects applications with predictable degradation under heavy loads.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

RapLeaf is an aggregation service for personalization data. Their goal is to help companies gain insight into their customers, engage them more meaningfully, and deliver the right message at the right time. At the same time they want to help consumers understand their online footprint. Manish Shah of Rapleaf describes their offering.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

John Woodell, a JRuby developer from Google, describes the state of JRuby on Google’s AppEngine.

App Engine version 1.4.0. is here! It’s our most significant release of the year for the App Engine SDK, including a number of very big features that we know developers have been eagerly awaiting. App Engine’s infrastructure can now anticipate the need for more resources and warm up new application instances (in the background) before routing user traffic to them.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Luke Kanies, Founder and CEO of Puppet Labs and Puppet’s original author, talks about how Puppet relies on modeling and why. He discusses the trade-offs that come with a modeled approach, delving into what models exist, how they interact, and how that benefits the developer, integrator, and, most importantly, the sysadmin. Puppet’s declarative language is a key part of its model so special attention is given to why they’ve built a declarative specification language, including plans for the future and why no one will be replacing it with pure Ruby any time soon. Luke also discusses Puppet’s resource types, the directed acyclic graph at the heart of the transactional system, and how Puppet can make guarantees about simulation mode, auditing, and logging.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Kevin Kelly, Founding Executive Editor of Wired Magazine and noted technologist, presents the ideas from latest book, “What Technology Wants.”

“It suggests that technology as a whole is not just a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies.

…This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come. By adopting the principles of pro-action and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles. And by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.”

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Shelly Roche of Wordchuck reveals tips and tricks for internationalizing and localizing your application. She covers the basics of i18n, common pitfalls, hidden challenges, and what she’s learned building Wordchuck, a service that streamlines the localization process.

See more of the Pivotal Labs Tech Talk series at http://pivotallabs.com/talks

Patrick Vlaskovits, co-author of “The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany”, addresses some fallacies around customer development and describes multiple approaches on how to hack “Getting Out of The Building” such that product development decisions can be made with better, higher-quality data.

See all our talks at http://pivotallabs.com/talks