I became aware of the Velocity just after last years conference. ((http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2009)) Many of the presentations were published online and I watched several of them. They were insightful, fresh, and dead on target for web operations education. I fell in love at once. Watch/read the presentations here and here. Then check out the upcoming conference.
“Web performance and operations is an emerging discipline which requires incredible breadth, focusing less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together. While people often specialize in particular components, great engineers and developers understand web performance and operations in relation to the whole. The best are able to fly to the 50,000 foot view and see the entire system in motion and then zoom in to microscopic levels and examine the tiny movements of an individual part.”
((http://en.oreilly.com/velocity2010))