December, 2013

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Updated Lampson's Hints for Computer Systems Design

All Things Distributed

'This year I have not been able to publish many back-to-basics readings, so I will not close the year with a recap of those. Instead I have a video of a wonderful presentation by Butler Lampson where he talks about the learnings of the past decades that helped him to update his excellent 1983 " Hints for computer system design ". The presentation was part of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum helt in September of this year.

Design 129
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The Corrosive Effects of Complexity

The Agile Manager

"Much complexity has been deliberately created, to encourage consumers to pay more than they need, or expected." John Kay, The Wrong Sort of Competition in Energy Modern software assets are complex in both their technical composition and their means of creation. They are built with multiple programming languages, are expected to conform to OO standards and SOA principles, make use of automated tests and a progressive build pipeline, require a diverse set of skills (UX, developers, QA analysts,

Energy 45
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Writing

Tim Kadlec

Everyone knows the dream. You go to school/work/some other public setting and everyone starts laughing at you. Horrified, you realize you’ve forgotten to put on your pants that day. Then the therapy sessions start. It’s a common dream because it plays off a very common fear: that of being exposed. Of having nothing to hide (both metaphorically, and in the dream, anatomically).

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Performance tips for building responsive sites

Speed Curve

The following article was originally published in the 2013 Performance Calendar. There's 31 great articles to explore in the calendar including Steve Souders's browser wishlist and Tim Kadlec's take on what it takes to create a performance culture. -. Responsive Web Design (RWD) is now a well established technique yet it’s adoption is still surprisingly low.

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2013 Favorites

Tim Kadlec

Time for the long-running (since way back in 2012 !) annual tradition of listing the top five most popular posts on this site of the past year. Here are 2013’s favorites, in order of popularity. Why We Need Responsive Images. The responsive image discussion is the Never Ending Story of web technology. Some people were, understandably, getting frustrated and questioning whether it was worth the fuss so I decided to see how much page weight could be saved by serving appropriately sized images to s

Media 40
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Holistic Performance

Tim Kadlec

I’ve been talking a lot over the past year or so about the importance of moving performance beyond something that is seen as a “developer task” I was really happy that Stoyan Stefanov let me expand on that for this year’s (excellent!) edition of the Performance Calendar : Bad performance online is not a technological problem; it’s a cultural one.

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Taking DynamoDB beyond Key-Value: Now with Faster, More Flexible, More Powerful Query Capabilities

All Things Distributed

'We launched DynamoDB last year to address the need for a cloud database that provides seamless scalability, irrespective of whether you are doing ten transactions or ten million transactions, while providing rock solid durability and availability. Our vision from the day we conceived DynamoDB was to fulfil this need without limiting the query functionality that people have come to expect from a database.

Games 130