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MyBlogLog's Ian Kennedy talked to Memcached developers who gathered last week to collaborate on code at an all-night hackfest. Memcached is "a general-purpose distributed memory caching system...distributed under a permissive free software licence."

Here's what we saw. From Yahoo HQ in Sunnyvale:

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When I started the Exceptional Performance group at Yahoo! in 2004 I had a plan for making fast and efficient web site performance part of the "Yahoo! DNA." Here's the process I envisioned:

• Quantify - Define what performance means and how to measure it.
• Profile - Analyze performance looking for the bottlenecks and potential big-wins.
• Research - Find out how to improve performance.
• Gather - Gather the lessons learned and prioritize them.
• Evangelize - Spread the word about what works.
• Codify - Capture this expertise so people could "learn to fish" for themselves.

After two years we'd completed these steps, but many Yahoo! web sites still weren't as fast as they could be. We needed to reach even more teams and get wider adoption. But how? The plan we'd already executed had come to me easily in the very first meeting about Exceptional Performance. But two years later I was stymied about how to drive the final miles of implementation.

Then it hit me: Open source it!

I decided the best way to reach these last holdouts was to release our best practices and tools to the web community beyond Yahoo!. Maybe external attention would encourage internal adoption. I had no idea if this would work, but I had nothing to lose by trying. I started writing a book for O'Reilly Media, High Performance Web Sites. I contacted Joe Hewitt, author of Firebug, the amazing Firefox extension for front-end developers, about integrating YSlow (then a Greasemonkey script). I spoke at conferences, covered our performance efforts on the Yahoo! Developer Network and published articles on the YUIblog with my colleague Tenni Theurer and her team.

Did it work? Better than I ever expected. Yahoo!'s performance work has been incredibly well received by the web development community. High Performance Web Sites hit #1 on Amazon under Computers & Internet. Over 150,000 people have downloaded YSlow. Our resources about web site performance are a leading destination on the Yahoo! Developer Network, and generate lots of comments. We've been mentioned on the front pages of Slashdot (twice) and O'Reilly Radar (twice), and reached #2 on Digg.

Yahoo! cares about giving back to the developer community by contributing tools that help designers and developers build faster pages and a better user experience. That benefit alone has made this work worthwhile. But opening up has also helped my team achieve our goals. Exposure through conferences and influential tech blogs has helped us reach people within the company and get their buy-in. The feedback on YSlow, the reach of my book, and articles from the team have contributed to our knowledge base.

I truly believe this is just the tip of the optimization iceberg. Flash, mobile devices, backend servers, JavaScript, web page design– these are some of the areas I hope to dive into in 2008. I'll keep you posted.

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