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Today Amazon Web Services takes another big step in making it easier to migrate legacy storage systems to the cloud through AWS Import/Export support for ingesting Punch Cards. AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage media for transport. MORE
I was recently working on a site whose code I was inheriting and the pages took much longer to process than I would’ve liked. Caching helped, but I wanted to get to the underlying issue so I fired up Webgrind to see if I could trace the problem. Webgrind is a freely available PHP profiling frontend that sits on top of XDebug. Using it, you can see how many times different functions are called and find what functions called them. MORE
Far too many projects and marketing campaigns today start by answering the question “What value does this have for our company?” ” The question shouldn’t center around the company, the question should center around the users. What we should be asking is “What value does this have for our users?” ” It’s a very simple concept, but it is one that, if adhered to, would fundamentally alter the priorities of a project. MORE
The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. In the 2010 Shareholder Letter Jeff Bezos writes about the unique technologies developed at Amazon.com over the years. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. By Werner Vogels on 27 April 2011 12:51 AM. Permalink. Comments (). MORE
In an interesting post on the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz argues that happiness is overrated : …when we seek happiness as the ultimate state, we’re destined to be disappointed. Absent unhappiness, how would we even recognize it? If we’re fortunate, happiness is a place we visit from time to time rather than inhabit permanently. As a steady state, it has the limits of any steady state: it’s not especially interesting or dynamic. MORE
40 
Performance optimization is the Rodney Dangerfield of web development–it “don’t get no respect” In spite of its great importance in the overall user experience, it is all too often pushed aside and treated as an afterthought. In my conversations with designers and developers who don’t optimize, a few of the same myths are constantly brought up. Performance optimization isn’t that necessary. MORE
29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010). 30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010). 31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010). This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “ Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads ,” is now live on DDJ’s website. MORE
Twitter is abuzz (and not in a good way) over an article that was posted yesterday at econsultancy.com on HTML5. The issue is that the article is passing around inaccurate information about what HTML5 actually is. Like this little tidbit: Those cool bouncing Google homepage balls everyone was talking about last week were an example of HTML5, but if you want to see an example of what the format can really do, take a look at this. MORE
I forgot to blog about this until now because of focusing on the Effective Concurrency course in Stockholm a few weeks ago, but to answer those who wonder if I’ll be giving it again in North America too: Yes, I’m also giving the public Effective Concurrency course again at the end of this month at the Construx facility in Bellevue, WA, USA. This will be the full four-day version of the course. Spaces are still available. MORE
In an old, but still relevant, article from Wired , Brian Eno talks about the value of designing with limited options: Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users: “How do we pack the maximum number of options into the minimum space and price?” ” In my experience, the instruments and tools that endure (because they are loved by their users) have limited options. MORE
Today, John Gruber wrote about Internet Explorer 9: The new UI removes most of the junk from the UI. Kind of interesting how web browsers have evolved to expose fewer UI elements. Most apps go the other way over time. Of course, that’s because the page/site is the real app. And like most apps they are indeed going the other way. The browser is not really an app; it’s a shell, like the OS shell, just a runtime necessity to run the real app and provide some convenience housekeeping tools. MORE
So technically the site has been live for a month or so now, but since we just finalized our speaker lineup, I thought now would be a good time to “announce” Breaking Development 2011 —a conference I’m helping to organize in Dallas, TX on April 11-12th. Breaking Development is a two day conference dedicated to mobile web design and development. MORE
29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010). 30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010). 31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010). 32 Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results (August 2010). This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results,” is now live on DDJ’s website. MORE
Jeremy Keith recently wrote a post about some of the false dichotomies in web development. When faced with two options, we are often presented with a solution that paints one option black and one white as if there was no middle ground. MORE
We’ll be posting abstracts (summaries) of the C++ and Beyond 2010 sessions over the coming days over at the C&B site. They are available today in several shipping C++ compilers, including Intel C++ 11, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and gcc 4.5. Lambdas, Lambdas Everywhere. Below is the first, for my talk on “Lambdas, Lambdas Everywhere.” ” This is a brand new talk. MORE
I was reading an excellent post by Jonathan Harris entitled “Our Digital Crisis” and one section in particular jumped out at me. Harris was talking about how our online tools are better for breadth than depth and generally increase noise. We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril. Of course this isn’t exactly a new issue. MORE
29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010). 30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010). 31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010). 32 Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results (August 2010). 33 Know When to Use an Active Object Instead of a Mutex (September 2010). MORE
Three seconds does not always equal three seconds. Our perception of time is greatly skewed by a variety of seemingly unrelated factors, making it easy for us to perceive 3 seconds as 5 seconds, or as 1 second. Since ultimately it is how fast the user thinks our site is that matters, regardless what the stats say, we need to be very aware of these extraneous factors that influence their perception. One such factor is color. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 09 December 2010 11:30 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Big Just Got Bigger - 5 Terabyte Object Support in Amazon S3. Permalink. Comments (). Today, Amazon S3 announced a new breakthrough in supporting customers with large files by increasing the maximum supported object size from 5 gigabytes to 5 terabytes. MORE
Elements of Design. At C++ and Beyond next week (and in December) I’ll also be giving a brand-new half-day talk on Elements of Design. I’m passionate about design, in part because it requires specific skills and taste, but most off all because it’s so important for every programmer — whether building a new library or extending one, building a new class or maintaining one, and that covers pretty much all of us. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 19 November 2010 07:51 AM. for November 2010 was released and an Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute Instance based cluster came in at #231. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. This week in review: GPUs, Zombies, Biomimicry and Tom Waits. Permalink. Comments (). MORE
A bit late to the game, but I was honored to write an article for this years Performance Calendar earlier this month. The article was a gentle introduction to using Phing to automating performance tasks. Fitting right in with the “Performance Toolbelt” posts I started adding to the site this year, it introduces yet another freely available tool that can greatly simplify the process of optimizing performance. Be sure to check it out. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 05 December 2010 02:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud with DNS - Introducing Amazon Route 53. Permalink. Comments (). I am very excited that today we have launched Amazon Route 53, a high-performance and highly-available Domain Name System (DNS) service. MORE
Continuing what I started last year , here’s the list of books I managed to read this year. I read slightly fewer books this year than last (33 compared to 38). I didn’t exactly aim high (in last year’s post I said I wanted to read at a “similar pace”) so I guess I didn’t fail that miserably. I’m slowly reducing the amount of movies and TV I watch, so hopefully that will provide a little more room to read a bit more in 2011. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 30 September 2010 04:27 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Around the World in 28 Days. Permalink. Comments (). On Monday I will leave Seattle for 4 weeks of meeting existing and future customers of the Amazon Web Services. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 14 November 2010 04:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Adding the Incredible Power of the Amazon EC2 Cluster GPU Instances. Permalink. Comments (). Today Amazon Web Services takes another step on the continuous innovation path by announcing a new Amazon EC2 instance type: The Cluster GPU Instance. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 12 July 2010 05:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2. Permalink. Comments (). Today, Amazon Web Services took very an important step in unlocking the advantages of cloud computing for a very important application area. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 29 September 2010 07:50 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Reboot. Permalink. Comments (). Like many folks who started down the path of using real-time micro-blogging services (read: twitter ) the convenience of those platforms has made that sharing happens there instead of on the blogs we (used to) keep. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 28 April 2010 11:00 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Opening the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Permalink. Comments (). Today Amazon Web Services has taken another important step in serving customers worldwide: the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region is now launched. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 18 May 2010 04:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage. Permalink. Comments (). Today a new storage option for Amazon S3 has been launched: Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS). MORE
Amazon Cloudfront is Streaming Media 2010 Editors pick. By Werner Vogels on 19 April 2010 03:02 AM. I am excited that Amazon Cloudfront has been selected as one of the 10 Editors pick of 2010 by Streaming Media. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Permalink. Comments (). MORE
By Werner Vogels on 22 April 2010 05:17 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. I am looking for new application and platform services. Permalink. Comments (). The ecosystem of new application and platform services in the cloud is the future of application development. MORE
By Werner Vogels on 24 February 2010 07:00 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Choosing Consistency. Permalink. Comments (). Amazon SimpleDB has launched today with a new set of features giving the customer more control over which consistency and concurrency models to use in their database operations. MORE
It's pretty well established that Agile and Lean IT are more operationally efficient than traditional IT. Agile teams tend to commit fewer unforced errors, and don't defer work. This results in fewer surprises - and with it, fewer surprise costs - in the final stages of delivery. Agile practices unwind the “requirements arms race” between business and IT, while Lean practices reduce waste throughout the delivery cycle. MORE
Writing in the FT's Long View column , James Mackintosh makes the point that hedge fund managers “appeared smarter than they really were, because they were taking a risk they did not recognize.” That’s an apt description for a lot of what goes on in IT, too. Despite all of the risks that commonly befall an IT project, we still deal with IT planning as an exercise in deterministic forecasting: if these people do these things in this sequence we will produce this software by this date. MORE
One of the more hotly debated subjects in the recent debate on financial services reform has been the reintroduction of Glass-Stegall. Enacted in 1933, the intent was in part to prevent banks from financing speculative investments with money obtained through deposit and lending. MORE
In this last post in the series on restructuring IT, we'll take a look at some things we can do to get going on a restructure. The place to start is to establish a reason for restructure that everybody inside and outside the organization can understand. Tech is inherently optimistic, and we have short memories. As a result, we don't have very good self awareness. So it's worth performing a critical analysis of our department’s success rate. MORE
This is a continuation of a series I left off in December 2009 on Restructuring IT. This post presents a few guiding principles to understand before undertaking a restructuring exercise. First, don't fool yourself about your ambitions. Come to grips with what you think you want to be: a demonstrably world-class organization, or just less bad at what you do. The prior is easy to say but hard to achieve. MORE
Loading on-demand code can boost website performance in the sense that the browser does not need to request and execute Javascript code that is not needed. Depending on the script, a different approach can be taken to lazy load it. Progressive enhancement Javascript This is by far the best scenario. Javascript is used to improve user experience but the web page can work without Javascript (in example, browsers with Javascript disabled). MORE
Like many thousands of other people, I was forced to stay in London for an extra few days because weather-related factors caused Heathrow and other UK airports to close. Nearly a week after it began, thousands remain stranded. Most analyses of why this happened have looked at how supply-side factors such as additional snowplows or seat capacity on contract could lessen the impact of an event like this. MORE
It’s been several weeks since I wrote a tutorial to implement BigPipe using C# and ASP.Net MVC. And I have just read a PDF from a presentation at Velocity China in which Changhao Jiang, from Facebook, explains some details about Bigpipe, as well as other techniques they use to improve Time to interact (both real and perceived), as well as data savings. MORE
Industries are regulated by governments so that companies don't compromise the public interest. Regulatory agencies usually grab headlines because most regulation comes in response to nefarious actions, but it isn't always the case: people in a company may conduct their affairs in what they believe to be a perfectly justifiable manner, only for there to be unintended consequences of what they do to consumers or society. MORE
Parts of the tutorial Introduction to BigPipe How ASP.Net MVC fits in the model. Registering and generating pagelets Browser implementation of BigPipe. Loading pagelets and their resources effectively Check out the demo Visual Studio solution Through a series of posts I will explain how we can implement BigPipe Facebook using ASP.Net MVC. In this first post I will describe what BigPipe is and sketch how we can make a similar implementation using ASP.Net MVC. MORE
Yesterday I was reading Zakas’ Performance on the Yahoo! Homepage slideshare presentation , and I got very surprised when I saw that Yahoo had realised that two of the wide accepted tips for improving website performance had not work so well for them. 1) Put scripts at the bottom (slide 37) Or at least that is what Yahoo recommends , and it contributes as one of the indicators to calculate YSlow score. MORE
2010 Related Topics All Things Distributed
APRIL 19, 2010
Amazon Cloudfront is Streaming Media 2010 Editors pick. By Werner Vogels on 19 April 2010 03:02 AM. I am excited that Amazon Cloudfront has been selected as one of the 10 Editors pick of 2010 by Streaming Media. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Permalink. Comments ().
Jos
NOVEMBER 13, 2010
Loading on-demand code can boost website performance in the sense that the browser does not need to request and execute Javascript code that is not needed. Depending on the script, a different approach can be taken to lazy load it. Progressive enhancement Javascript This is by far the best scenario. Javascript is used to improve user experience but the web page can work without Javascript (in example, browsers with Javascript disabled).
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All Things Distributed
APRIL 27, 2011
The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. In the 2010 Shareholder Letter Jeff Bezos writes about the unique technologies developed at Amazon.com over the years. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. By Werner Vogels on 27 April 2011 12:51 AM. Permalink. Comments ().
All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 15, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 14 November 2010 04:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Adding the Incredible Power of the Amazon EC2 Cluster GPU Instances. Permalink. Comments (). Today Amazon Web Services takes another step on the continuous innovation path by announcing a new Amazon EC2 instance type: The Cluster GPU Instance.
Jos
DECEMBER 28, 2010
Yesterday I was reading Zakas’ Performance on the Yahoo! Homepage slideshare presentation , and I got very surprised when I saw that Yahoo had realised that two of the wide accepted tips for improving website performance had not work so well for them. 1) Put scripts at the bottom (slide 37) Or at least that is what Yahoo recommends , and it contributes as one of the indicators to calculate YSlow score.
Jos
DECEMBER 11, 2010
It’s been several weeks since I wrote a tutorial to implement BigPipe using C# and ASP.Net MVC. And I have just read a PDF from a presentation at Velocity China in which Changhao Jiang, from Facebook, explains some details about Bigpipe, as well as other techniques they use to improve Time to interact (both real and perceived), as well as data savings.
Jos
SEPTEMBER 18, 2010
Parts of the tutorial Introduction to BigPipe How ASP.Net MVC fits in the model. Registering and generating pagelets Browser implementation of BigPipe. Loading pagelets and their resources effectively Check out the demo Visual Studio solution Through a series of posts I will explain how we can implement BigPipe Facebook using ASP.Net MVC. In this first post I will describe what BigPipe is and sketch how we can make a similar implementation using ASP.Net MVC.
All Things Distributed
JULY 13, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 12 July 2010 05:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Cluster Compute Instances for Amazon EC2. Permalink. Comments (). Today, Amazon Web Services took very an important step in unlocking the advantages of cloud computing for a very important application area.
All Things Distributed
MARCH 31, 2010
Today Amazon Web Services takes another big step in making it easier to migrate legacy storage systems to the cloud through AWS Import/Export support for ingesting Punch Cards. AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage media for transport.
All Things Distributed
DECEMBER 9, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 09 December 2010 11:30 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Big Just Got Bigger - 5 Terabyte Object Support in Amazon S3. Permalink. Comments (). Today, Amazon S3 announced a new breakthrough in supporting customers with large files by increasing the maximum supported object size from 5 gigabytes to 5 terabytes.
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 29, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 29 September 2010 07:50 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Reboot. Permalink. Comments (). Like many folks who started down the path of using real-time micro-blogging services (read: twitter ) the convenience of those platforms has made that sharing happens there instead of on the blogs we (used to) keep.
All Things Distributed
NOVEMBER 19, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 19 November 2010 07:51 AM. for November 2010 was released and an Amazon EC2 Cluster Compute Instance based cluster came in at #231. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. This week in review: GPUs, Zombies, Biomimicry and Tom Waits. Permalink. Comments ().
All Things Distributed
SEPTEMBER 30, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 30 September 2010 04:27 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Around the World in 28 Days. Permalink. Comments (). On Monday I will leave Seattle for 4 weeks of meeting existing and future customers of the Amazon Web Services.
All Things Distributed
MAY 18, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 18 May 2010 04:00 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage. Permalink. Comments (). Today a new storage option for Amazon S3 has been launched: Amazon S3 Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS).
All Things Distributed
APRIL 28, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 28 April 2010 11:00 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Expanding the Cloud - Opening the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region. Permalink. Comments (). Today Amazon Web Services has taken another important step in serving customers worldwide: the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) Region is now launched.
All Things Distributed
APRIL 23, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 22 April 2010 05:17 PM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. I am looking for new application and platform services. Permalink. Comments (). The ecosystem of new application and platform services in the cloud is the future of application development.
All Things Distributed
FEBRUARY 24, 2010
By Werner Vogels on 24 February 2010 07:00 AM. The Amazon.com 2010 Shareholder Letter Focusses on Technology. All Things Distributed. Werner Vogels weblog on building scalable and robust distributed systems. Choosing Consistency. Permalink. Comments (). Amazon SimpleDB has launched today with a new set of features giving the customer more control over which consistency and concurrency models to use in their database operations.
Sutter's Mill
SEPTEMBER 24, 2010
29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010). 30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010). 31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010). 32 Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results (August 2010). 33 Know When to Use an Active Object Instead of a Mutex (September 2010).
Sutter's Mill
AUGUST 27, 2010
29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010). 30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010). 31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010). 32 Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results (August 2010). This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results,” is now live on DDJ’s website.
Sutter's Mill
JULY 12, 2010
29 Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs” (Jan 2010). 30 Associate Mutexes with Data to Prevent Races (May 2010). 31 Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads (June 2010). This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “ Prefer Using Active Objects Instead of Naked Threads ,” is now live on DDJ’s website.
Sutter's Mill
OCTOBER 7, 2010
We’ll be posting abstracts (summaries) of the C++ and Beyond 2010 sessions over the coming days over at the C&B site. They are available today in several shipping C++ compilers, including Intel C++ 11, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and gcc 4.5. Lambdas, Lambdas Everywhere. Below is the first, for my talk on “Lambdas, Lambdas Everywhere.” ” This is a brand new talk.
Sutter's Mill
OCTOBER 22, 2010
Elements of Design. At C++ and Beyond next week (and in December) I’ll also be giving a brand-new half-day talk on Elements of Design. I’m passionate about design, in part because it requires specific skills and taste, but most off all because it’s so important for every programmer — whether building a new library or extending one, building a new class or maintaining one, and that covers pretty much all of us.
Sutter's Mill
SEPTEMBER 15, 2010
Today, John Gruber wrote about Internet Explorer 9: The new UI removes most of the junk from the UI. Kind of interesting how web browsers have evolved to expose fewer UI elements. Most apps go the other way over time. Of course, that’s because the page/site is the real app. And like most apps they are indeed going the other way. The browser is not really an app; it’s a shell, like the OS shell, just a runtime necessity to run the real app and provide some convenience housekeeping tools.
Sutter's Mill
JUNE 10, 2010
I forgot to blog about this until now because of focusing on the Effective Concurrency course in Stockholm a few weeks ago, but to answer those who wonder if I’ll be giving it again in North America too: Yes, I’m also giving the public Effective Concurrency course again at the end of this month at the Construx facility in Bellevue, WA, USA. This will be the full four-day version of the course. Spaces are still available.
The Agile Manager
APRIL 26, 2010
It's pretty well established that Agile and Lean IT are more operationally efficient than traditional IT. Agile teams tend to commit fewer unforced errors, and don't defer work. This results in fewer surprises - and with it, fewer surprise costs - in the final stages of delivery. Agile practices unwind the “requirements arms race” between business and IT, while Lean practices reduce waste throughout the delivery cycle.
Tim Kadlec
JANUARY 1, 2011
Continuing what I started last year , here’s the list of books I managed to read this year. I read slightly fewer books this year than last (33 compared to 38). I didn’t exactly aim high (in last year’s post I said I wanted to read at a “similar pace”) so I guess I didn’t fail that miserably. I’m slowly reducing the amount of movies and TV I watch, so hopefully that will provide a little more room to read a bit more in 2011.
Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 2, 2010
Three seconds does not always equal three seconds. Our perception of time is greatly skewed by a variety of seemingly unrelated factors, making it easy for us to perceive 3 seconds as 5 seconds, or as 1 second. Since ultimately it is how fast the user thinks our site is that matters, regardless what the stats say, we need to be very aware of these extraneous factors that influence their perception. One such factor is color.
The Agile Manager
JULY 9, 2010
One of the more hotly debated subjects in the recent debate on financial services reform has been the reintroduction of Glass-Stegall. Enacted in 1933, the intent was in part to prevent banks from financing speculative investments with money obtained through deposit and lending.
The Agile Manager
DECEMBER 24, 2010
Like many thousands of other people, I was forced to stay in London for an extra few days because weather-related factors caused Heathrow and other UK airports to close. Nearly a week after it began, thousands remain stranded. Most analyses of why this happened have looked at how supply-side factors such as additional snowplows or seat capacity on contract could lessen the impact of an event like this.
Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 27, 2010
A bit late to the game, but I was honored to write an article for this years Performance Calendar earlier this month. The article was a gentle introduction to using Phing to automating performance tasks. Fitting right in with the “Performance Toolbelt” posts I started adding to the site this year, it introduces yet another freely available tool that can greatly simplify the process of optimizing performance. Be sure to check it out.
Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 8, 2010
Jeremy Keith recently wrote a post about some of the false dichotomies in web development. When faced with two options, we are often presented with a solution that paints one option black and one white as if there was no middle ground.
The Agile Manager
NOVEMBER 30, 2010
Industries are regulated by governments so that companies don't compromise the public interest. Regulatory agencies usually grab headlines because most regulation comes in response to nefarious actions, but it isn't always the case: people in a company may conduct their affairs in what they believe to be a perfectly justifiable manner, only for there to be unintended consequences of what they do to consumers or society.
Tim Kadlec
DECEMBER 7, 2010
So technically the site has been live for a month or so now, but since we just finalized our speaker lineup, I thought now would be a good time to “announce” Breaking Development 2011 —a conference I’m helping to organize in Dallas, TX on April 11-12th. Breaking Development is a two day conference dedicated to mobile web design and development.
The Agile Manager
OCTOBER 31, 2010
In this last post in the series on restructuring IT, we'll take a look at some things we can do to get going on a restructure. The place to start is to establish a reason for restructure that everybody inside and outside the organization can understand. Tech is inherently optimistic, and we have short memories. As a result, we don't have very good self awareness. So it's worth performing a critical analysis of our department’s success rate.
Tim Kadlec
OCTOBER 27, 2010
I was reading an excellent post by Jonathan Harris entitled “Our Digital Crisis” and one section in particular jumped out at me. Harris was talking about how our online tools are better for breadth than depth and generally increase noise. We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril. Of course this isn’t exactly a new issue.
Tim Kadlec
OCTOBER 17, 2010
Performance optimization is the Rodney Dangerfield of web development–it “don’t get no respect” In spite of its great importance in the overall user experience, it is all too often pushed aside and treated as an afterthought. In my conversations with designers and developers who don’t optimize, a few of the same myths are constantly brought up. Performance optimization isn’t that necessary.
The Agile Manager
SEPTEMBER 29, 2010
This is a continuation of a series I left off in December 2009 on Restructuring IT. This post presents a few guiding principles to understand before undertaking a restructuring exercise. First, don't fool yourself about your ambitions. Come to grips with what you think you want to be: a demonstrably world-class organization, or just less bad at what you do. The prior is easy to say but hard to achieve.
Tim Kadlec
OCTOBER 5, 2010
In an interesting post on the Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz argues that happiness is overrated : …when we seek happiness as the ultimate state, we’re destined to be disappointed. Absent unhappiness, how would we even recognize it? If we’re fortunate, happiness is a place we visit from time to time rather than inhabit permanently. As a steady state, it has the limits of any steady state: it’s not especially interesting or dynamic.
Tim Kadlec
SEPTEMBER 22, 2010
In an old, but still relevant, article from Wired , Brian Eno talks about the value of designing with limited options: Designers struggle endlessly with a problem that is almost nonexistent for users: “How do we pack the maximum number of options into the minimum space and price?” ” In my experience, the instruments and tools that endure (because they are loved by their users) have limited options.
Tim Kadlec
SEPTEMBER 13, 2010
Twitter is abuzz (and not in a good way) over an article that was posted yesterday at econsultancy.com on HTML5. The issue is that the article is passing around inaccurate information about what HTML5 actually is. Like this little tidbit: Those cool bouncing Google homepage balls everyone was talking about last week were an example of HTML5, but if you want to see an example of what the format can really do, take a look at this.
The Agile Manager
AUGUST 31, 2010
Writing in the FT's Long View column , James Mackintosh makes the point that hedge fund managers “appeared smarter than they really were, because they were taking a risk they did not recognize.” That’s an apt description for a lot of what goes on in IT, too. Despite all of the risks that commonly befall an IT project, we still deal with IT planning as an exercise in deterministic forecasting: if these people do these things in this sequence we will produce this software by this date.
Tim Kadlec
AUGUST 26, 2010
Far too many projects and marketing campaigns today start by answering the question “What value does this have for our company?” ” The question shouldn’t center around the company, the question should center around the users. What we should be asking is “What value does this have for our users?” ” It’s a very simple concept, but it is one that, if adhered to, would fundamentally alter the priorities of a project.
Tim Kadlec
AUGUST 23, 2010
I was recently working on a site whose code I was inheriting and the pages took much longer to process than I would’ve liked. Caching helped, but I wanted to get to the underlying issue so I fired up Webgrind to see if I could trace the problem. Webgrind is a freely available PHP profiling frontend that sits on top of XDebug. Using it, you can see how many times different functions are called and find what functions called them.
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