Welcome to Lanyrd

We've been live now for a week and a half, so it's about time the project gained a blog! Expect to see posts about new features and updates to the service here, as well as news about conferences and public speaking in general.

Lanyrd is a joint project by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe. We're a newly-wed couple travelling around the world on a multi-year honeymoon. Since we're both web developers, the plan is to earn money as we go. Lanyrd is our first project produced on the road, but it's already looking like it will keep us busy for a long time to come.

We've been in Morocco now for just over a month. We launched Lanyrd from a rented apartment in Casablanca, and we're writing this update from a Riad in Marrakech. So far, travelling and working on a startup have complemented each other surprisingly well.

A few numbers: Lanyrd is now listing 1,508 conferences and 5,167 individual speaker profiles. 5,637 people have signed in to the site and made 13,293 edits to our data. A big thank you to everyone who has helped populate the site — we're amazed at the response and have plenty of features planned to make the most of all of that beautiful data.

We're not just interested in upcoming events — we care about events in the past as well. We currently have 683 past conferences and we look forward to this number growing as more speakers start using Lanyrd's profile pages to build a portfolio of the talks they have given.

So subscribe to our feed for future updates and make sure you're following @lanyrd on Twitter. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to drop us a line at info -at- lanyrd.com or take a look at our FAQ. We'd love to know what you think!

my username is commented…

Amazing story, major congrats on the immediate success of this brilliant service and continued happiness to you both.

Commented at 8:32pm on 11th September 2010

Si Jobling commented…

Great to see some responsive design on Lanyard - first time I've checked the site on iPhone and it works rather well.

Keep up the responsive workflow. It's refreshing to see such active involvement with your community and rapid deployment to the site.

Commented at 8:35pm on 11th September 2010

Jason Dixon commented…

We've been collecting some performance data on http://lanyrd.com/ since the launch that you might find interesting. The first one represents the time for the initial HTTP connection to complete. The 2nd is duration until the first byte of data returns, and the last graph shows the total duration with a red overlay for the number of bytes returned.

https://circonus.com/shared/grap...
https://circonus.com/shared/grap...
https://circonus.com/shared/grap...

Commented at 8:42pm on 11th September 2010

Simon Willison commented…

Wow, great graphs - we've messed around a bunch with our server stack (one Linode, then two Linodes, then three EC2 large instances, now 3 EC2 small instances) but there are some fundamental problems with how we generate the dashboard at the moment (the most expensive page on the site, but also one of the most popular) that I need to fix. It's a classic case of getting way more dynamic traffic than we expected so soon after launch.

Commented at 8:48pm on 11th September 2010