Informationweek Influencer
souders's Selections From the Web
Too often, any talk of web performance quickly ventures into the land of heavy geekery. Terms like DNS lookups, Gzipping, minifying, far future expires headers, caching, ETags and more are thrown around and consequently lose the attention of most non-techy people. This perpetuates a mentality that performance is solely a technical concern that only developers need to concern themselves with. It’s time for us to treat performance as an essential design feature, not just as a technical best practice.From time to time I get asked what I do for a living. Whenever I mention that I work in mobile, I’ve had people immediately react FACEBOOK SUCKS!Why
For many of us developers, WebKit is a black box. We throw HTML, CSS, JS and a bunch of assets at it, and WebKit, somehow.. magically, gives us a webpage that looks and works well. But in fact, as my colleague Ilya Grigorik puts it…Now, especially with the news that Opera has moved to WebKit, we have a lot of WebKit browsers out there, but its pretty hard to know what they share and where they part ways. Below we’ll hopefully shine some light on this. As a result you’ll be able to diagnose browser differences better, report bugs at the right tracker, and understand how to develop against specific browsers more effectively.There are different
Preface: Nothing in this post is necessarily new, or even anything I thought of first (save for a name or two). However, I’m writing it because I’d like to start building some consistency and naming conventions around a few of the techniques that I am using (and are becoming more common), as well as document some processes that I find helpful.Much of this comes from my experience deploying applications at Bazaarvoice as a large third party vendor, and should probably be tailored to your specific environment. I’m sure someone does the opposite of me in each step of this with good results.Also, I fully understand the irony of loading a few MBs
Step one, monitor all the things. Step two, dedicate 90% of your analytics time and resources to analyzing data, deriving insights, and iterating on what metrics are being monitored and are being optimized. However, there is one small problem. Chances are, the amount of data produced by the instrumentation outpaces your ability to analyze, monitor, and correlate all the variations of the variables at play.This is where an anomaly detection algorithm, backed by a good statistical engine with access to the data can prove invaluable: it does not need to be perfect, but it should be able to alert you to significant outliers in the data. With the
Around this time every year, companies start doing their annual reviews. Coincidentally, software engineers start wondering what their peers and managers will be saying about them. Throughout my career I’ve always watched as colleagues worried about the results of their annual review. Will they get that promotion? Will they get that raise? Or will they be told that they are not performing up to expectations? All of this happens, like clockwork, once a year.Annual reviews are a reminder that your reputation matters. For most of the year, software engineers don’t care at all what anybody else thinks as long as they’re getting the job done. Then
Upcoming Events
Live Events
- BYOD into the Cloud: The Next Phase of Enterprise Mobility -
- Big Data: Architecting Systems at Speed - E2 Conference Boston
- Get practical information on how to develop your organization's mobile commerce application - Mobile Commerce World - Mobile Commerce World
- Mobile Connect - E2 Conference Boston - E2 Conference Boston
- How to Choose a SaaS Vendor - E2 Conference Boston
This Week's Issue
Free Print Subscription
SubscribeSpecial Issue
Current Government Issue
- The Government CIO 25: These influential and accomplished government IT leaders are finding ways to be cost efficient and still innovate.
- Rethink Video Surveillance: It's not just about networked cameras anymore. New technology provides analytics, automation, facial recognition, real-time alerts and situational-awareness capabilities.
- Read the Current Issue
Featured Whitepapers
Featured Reports
- Strategy: Heading Off Advanced Social Engineering Attacks
- Strategy: Developing a Strategy for Enterprise Application Security
- Informed CIO: SDN and Server Virtualization on a Collision Course
- Strategy: One-Click Disaster Recovery
- Strategy: Smartphone Smackdown: Galaxy Note II vs. Lumia 920 vs. iPhone 5
