Which is easier to tune, humans or machines?

Kate Matsudaira on the human side of performance and operations.

In this new Velocity Podcast, I had a conversation with Kate Matsudaira (@katemats), Vice President of Engineering at Decide.com. This conversation centers mostly on the human side of engineering and performance. Kate has some great insights into building an environment for human performance that goes along with your quest for more performant, reliable, scalable, tolerant, secure web properties.

Our conversation lasted 00:20:00 and if you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. Kate provides some of her background and experience as well as what she is currently doing at Decide.com here. The full conversation is outlined below.

  • Which is easier to tune for performance, humans or machines? 00:00:30
  • To achieve better performance from people, how do you teach people to trade-off the variables time, cost, quality and scope? 00:02:32
  • What do you look for when you hire engineers that will work on highly performant web properties? 00:05:06
  • In this talent-surplus economy, do you find it more difficult to hire engineers? 00:07:10
  • How do you demonstrate DevOps and Performance engineering value to an organization? 00:08:36
  • How does one go about monitoring everything and not slow down your web properties with monitoring everything? 00:12:56
  • Does continuous improvement help deliver performant properties? 00:15:14

If you would like to hear Kate speak on “Leveling up – Taking your operations and engineering role to the next level,” she is presenting at the 2012 Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Wednesday 6/27/12 at 1:00 pm. We hope to see you there. You can also read Kate’s blog for more insights into what she is up to.

Velocity 2012: Web Operations & Performance — The smartest minds in web operations and performance are coming together for the Velocity Conference, being held June 25-27 in Santa Clara, Calif.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

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