The Computer Measurement Group (CMG) is making its conference proceedings from 1997 through 2005 available to the public. I believe that CMG holds the best practical conference in performance analysis, capacity planning, and related areas. In addition to the areas listed below, I'd definitely add performance testing. Here is the official mail CMG sent:

With great interest read Who Killed the Software Engineer? (Hint: It Happened in College) by James Maguire as well as the original article Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? by Dr. Robert Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg.

In a recent post, Jason Gorman highlights a common problem with code smells.

He is right.... code smells are a bit woolly and this leaves them open to interpretation. Because of this, like Jason, I've seen more time spent arguing whether the smell is present rather than whether or not the code should or should not be changed.

My performance requirements paper was published in the January issue of Software Test & Performance (pp.18-24).

It was simple: I just sent a draft – and now I am reading it printed. With a new name - or even two: it is referred as You Can Gauge Performance Without Requirements in one place and Gauging Performance in The Absence of Measures in another. Not to mention other minor improvement.

From time to time I see questions on different forums asking what skills are necessary for performance testers. There were pretty interesting discussions. Looks like most experts agree that performance testing requires more skills than just knowledge about how to create a script for a particular load testing tool. While it is still possible to imagine a performance tester in a large corporation with deep specialization who only creates scripts and mechanically runs them while other performance experts monitor the system and analyze results, I don't see many perspectives neither for this person, nor for the approach. Systems become so complicated now that the sum of specialized expert views doesn't give the whole performance picture.

Mark Friedman reviewed Neil J. Gunther's new book "Guerilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services"
in MeasureIT (free registration may be needed - I hate registrations, but this one is worth efforts if you care about performance: it is a very good newsletter).

Kirk proposed the "Shot in the Dark" anti-pattern. By my opinion, a must reading for all working with performance issues.