Velocity Conf knocked my socks off. This was my first O’Reilly conference and I can really see what the hub-bub is all about. Velocity was host to many top industry pioneers like the dudes from Etsy who created StatsD, Mitchell Hashimoto who works on Vagrant, and reps from Opera, Mozilla, and Google, among other big names.

When you use Rails built-in helpers for page, action, and fragment caching, the cached data is stored into an instance of ActiveSupport::Cache::Store. But while the interface for using the cache stores are the same, each cache store implementation has different performance characteristics and are suited for different jobs. In this post, I'll cover what cache stores are available with Rails by default, how to tune them, and how to write your own custom cache store.

There are a lot of CDNs out there, but I’ve decided to use Amazon’s CloudFront because it’s relatively cheap and easy to set up (not to mention it integrates seamlessly with S3).

In order to compress JavaScript and CSS files in my applications, I use Scott Becker’s AssetPackager plugin.