The centerpiece of the program is a Dell XPS-13 “ultrabook” that comes with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed. It has 3.6 GiB of Memory with Intel® Core™ i7-2637M CPU @ 1.70GHz × 4 Processor, 251.6 Gigabytes of disk space and a 64-bit OS. Like its namesake, Dell is hoping this project creates an ultrabook-race for developers’ computing needs. From my perspective, they are off to a great start.

First off, the Sputnik is noticeably faster than my MacBook Pro and my MacBook Air computers. For those of you using a Mac, when was the last time that you turned on your computer and, within 5-7 seconds, found it booted up and waiting for you to enter your password – and then, after you’d entered that correctly, found is instantaneously ready to use? I can answer that question for you: Never.

Also, when was the last time you held down your Delete key in a word processing app and saw the cursor move seemingly faster than your eyes could track? I think it was quicker to hit Delete and let the cursor do its work erasing paragraphs of data than to use a mouse and highlight an area and then hit delete. Most of us Mac users are conditioned to accept slow boot times, similar to the ’90s, when everyone was conditioned to hold “ctrl+alt+delete” and reboot on a Windows machine.

It is a sad statement that we let ourselves become conditioned and complacent with stupid computer foibles. Wouldn’t you rather turn on a device and start using it within seconds?

It is a little difficult to compare the XPS-13 to a MacBook Air because it has the computing power of the Pro, yet it’s the size of an Air. The only drawback is that the XPS screen resolution of 1366×768 is not on par with the MacBook Air’s 1440×900 or the Asus Prime laptop;s 1920×1200 resolution. I tether any of my computers to an external HDMI monitor, so I really don’t mind this resoluton mismatch. In fact, I find it hard to work with only one monitor these days. And for the times when I am not plugged into an external HDMI, the resolution is fine for the types of activities I need to get done.

My journey begins from the middle

Before we go to far, you should know I’ve used a MacBook Pro or Air for the previous 8 years. Before that, I used PCs with Windows of some version. It’s been a more than 15 years since I’ve used Unix or Linux for any extended period.

Each time I move from one platform to another platform, I like to run multi-platform apps or find a suitable alternative and hack it to work for my purposes. Music, email, browser histories (bookmarks, etc.), calendars, photo management, etc.

Ubuntu 12.04 really surprised me, in terms of how easy it was to use out of the box. I can drop down into the command line when needed but Ubuntu 12, with new GUI improvements, makes this machine similar to a MacBook Air for someone who is tech-savvy, but much faster. I am still blown away with how fast this laptop is. With Cairo Dock, I have the familiar dock at the bottom of the screen. Oddly enough, this is nice because my learned behavior [conditioned] is to look at the bottom for my apps. This makes launching apps familiar and easy.

But since I always look for the middle in any platform, I typically end up with Thunderbird as an email app, Chrome and Firefox as my browsers, and some text editor that does not have Word in its name. And, of course, MySQL and a spreadsheet application for managing data and analysis. I’ll occasionally use PHP or Javascript to do small projects that interest me.

The journey to another side

I understand one of the goals for this program is to make a development environment that has software installed specifically targeted to different developer profiles. The idea is that if you are a Java developer, you get this XPS with minimal Ubuntu preloaded. When you unbox, it you’ll then run Git and download your Java profile, or maybe a particular sub-profile of a Java environment. That might be a Java Enterprise profile, the embedded Java profile, the Java gaming profile, etc. The great thing here is we could see community profiles that reflect the wisdom of many rather than one company saying what you need. Keep that profile concept in mind as you read on.

There is definitely more to a development platform than just software tools. Before I continue on to the profiles and what you can expect there, let’s take a look at using this as both your work environment and your personal machine. I, for one, integrate my work and private life. I know many of you reading do not either, but I believe there are plenty of you that do. I purchase music that I may want to listen to as I do some work. I also take both business photos and personal photos and find that it is easier to just have them mix than to take the time to compartmentalize every activity of my day.

Once I got over the incredible speed of the machine, great ergonomics and the terrific feeling keyboard, I spent some time exploring the computer to find out what came pre-installed and what I would need to add for my personal usage. In other words, I spent some time looking for all the things that I use a laptop for in both professional and personal modes, like a terminal window, text editors (vim/gedit), spreadsheet applications, and the right web browser (Chromium). If I was going to use this as a replacement for my Mac, I also needed to set up my personal apps (social, images, music, etc). Lately, I’ve been using Git a lot, because our new Atlas authoring platform uses Git for version tracking. This XPS had all these apps installed.

Baffling bloatware

As I explored, what struck me was that, out of the box, Sputnik was not full of unnecessary bloatware apps. Some folks have said that Macs don’t come with bloatware either. To them, I’d ask: have you used Safari? To me, it is not in the same class as Firefox or Chrome — yet you have to keep it on your system or all hell breaks loose.

And while they may not be bloatware, per se, are Launchpad and Mission Control really necessary for me? I have never used them yet they are on my Mac’s Dock at install. Is PhotoBooth something I need to bring out my 8-year old silliness again?

Another app that drives me nuts is MobileMe sync. I cannot get rid of it from my tool bar and I am not going to pay Apple anything to store stuff in the cloud when Google gives me plenty of space for free. The XPS offers Ubuntu One cloud storage and you get oodles of space for free here, too. All that being said, one man’s bloatware is another man’s treasure. Let’s move on.

The concept of apps that are useful to one and not to another person leads me back to the profile idea. Wouldn’t it be nice to get just what you wanted from a software install? You chose the components when you purchase your machine and that is what it comes with. It would be awesome to also do this with mobile smartphones.

The potential of profiles

Dell is on the right track with their profile thinking. To me, this could be a game-changer in the computer manufacturer race. Dell’s project could disrupt an industry, shifting towards a new competition to deliver great hardware with custom profiles delivered as your software stack. The new race would be to build machines that developers want to use because they are the best, fastest and are tailored specifically to their needs.

Again, since no two developers are alike, the install image is pretty basic and minimal. Sputnik’s unique strength is that it will connect to a Git repository and pull down the developer profile/s you specify.

The first profiles Dell is targeting are Android, Ruby and JavaScript. I could see a whole host of celebrity profiles, business profiles, hacker profiles, open source profiles and hybrid profiles developing. I’d love to see a SMB profile that would enable a small business creator/owner to get a base machine, and then load on all the components of an open source stack that allows them to spin up their business with minimal effort and cost. Basically, that might include an install of WordPress, an email manager, a spreadsheet app for tracking invoices and expenses, and probably a word processor for correspondence. Next would be a “Scaling” profile, where you are growing your SMB from $5 million to $50 million in annual revenues. Once you have moved past the scaling profile, you’d likely to need a “DevOps profile” so you can manage the growth, size, scale, and operations of a large business.

It’s better to Git than receive?

To me, the idea of delivering a bare bones hardware device with the notion of layering software profiles on top of the machine has the potential effect of the original Sputnik launch. It will ignite a technology race in the ultrabook space.

Hopefully, it will inspire an industry to look closely at what their consumers want on purchased hardware, rather than giving them what the manufacturer thinks they need or want. I hope the mobile device makers are also listening, including the carriers that plop their bloatware on our devices. It would be nice to git what you want, rather than get what you receive.

We hope you will read this free report while thinking about all the open source projects, teams and communities that have contributed to the economic succes of small businesses or local governments, yet it’s hard to measure their true economic impact. We combed through mountains of data, built economic models, surveyed customers and had discussions with small and medium businesses (SMB) to pull together a fairly broad-reaching dataset on which to base our study. The results are what you will find in this report.

Here are a few of the findings we derived from Bluehost data (an EIG company) and follow-on research:

• 60% of web hosting usage is by SMBs, 71% if you include non-profits. Only 22% of hosted sites are for personal use.
• WordPress is a far more important open source product than most people give it credit for. In the SMB hosting market, it is as widely used as MySQL and PHP, far ahead of Joomla and Drupal, the other leading content management systems.
• Languages commonly used by high-tech startups, such as Ruby and Python, have little usage in the SMB hosting market, which is dominated by PHP for server-side scripting and JavaScript for client-side scripting.
• Open source hosting alternatives have at least a 2:1 cost advantage relative to proprietary solutions.

Given that SMBs are widely thought to generate as much as 50% of GDP, the productivity gains to the economy as a whole that can be attributed to open source software are significant. The most important open source programs contributing to this expansion of opportunity for small businesses include Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript, and WordPress. The developers of these open source projects and the communities that support them are truly unsung heroes of the economy!

Tim O’Reilly hosted a discussion at OSCON 2012 to examine the report’s findings. He was joined by Dan Handy, CEO of Bluehost; John Mone, EVP Technology at Endurance International Group; Roger Magoulas, Director of Market Research at O’Reilly; and Mike Hendrickson, VP of Content Strategy at O’Reilly. The following video contains the full discussion:

Related:

• Free download of “Economic Impact of Open Source on Small Business” (PDF, EPUB, Mobi)

Our conversation lasted 00:15:44 and if you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. Sarah provides some of her background and experience as well as what she is currently doing at Meteor here. The full conversation is outlined below.

• As a CIO, how do you bridge the gap between technology and business? 00:02:28
• How do you educate corporate stakeholders about the importance of DevOps and the impact it can have on IT? 00:03:26
• How does someone set up best practices in an organization? 00:05:24
• Are there signals that DevOps is actually happening where development and operations are merging? 00:08:31
• How do you measure performance and make large changes in an online game without disrupting players? 00:09:59
• How do you prepare for scaling your crazy awesome infrastructure needed for game play? 00:12:28
• Have you gathered metrics on public and private clouds and do you know which ones to scale to when needed? 00:14:03

In addition to her work at Meteor, Sarah is co-chair of OSCON 2012 (being held July 16-20 in Portland, Ore.). We hope to see you there. You can also read Sarah’s blog for more insights into what she’s 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.

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Related:

• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• See more Velocity podcasts
• Sign up for the Velocity newsletter

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.

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Related:

• Want to get ahead in DevOps? Expand your expertise and emotional intelligence
• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• See more Velocity podcasts
• Sign up for the Velocity newsletter

Our conversation lasted 00:11:15 and if you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. Schlomo talks a little about ImmobilienScout24, the tech stack they use, and his role at about 40 seconds into the conversation. The rest of the conversation is outlined below.

• Can you explain what a continuous delivery platform embodies? 00:01:37
• What role can DevOps play with a continuous delivery platform? 00:03:29
• How do you demonstrate the business value in building a continuous delivery platform and that it is working? 00:04:40
• What does a typical stack for a continuous delivery platform look like? 00:05:42
• What kind of of organizational changes are needed for a continuous delivery platform? 00:06:46
• What does the technical stack look like for a continuous delivery platform? 00:07:49
• So an open source stack is the way you would build a continuous delivery platform? 00:08:52
• Are we going to see you at Velocity in Santa Clara in June and London in October? 00:10:20

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

Related:

• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• See more Velocity podcasts
• Sign up for the Velocity newsletter

Our conversation lasted 00:23:31. If you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. There is a bit of a hiccup at around 21:21 so you will know that now it is not your connection, but our prior connection.

• Can you explain the difference between DevOps and NoOps 00:00:43
• If you have really good DevOps and your systems are running efficiently all the time, can you measure it? 00:05:44
• What criteria do you use to measure the effectiveness of DevOps in an organization? 00:10:43
• What does a typical dashboard look like that you use to monitor your systems and DevOps capabilities? 00:16:05
• Where do you see the velocity conference going? 00:20:35

If you would like to hear John speak on “Stronger and Faster,” he is presenting at the 2012 Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday 6/26/12 at 8:30 am. He’ll also present “Cuz|Eats Me Spinish” on Wednesday 6/27/12 at 8:30 am. We hope to see you there.

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

Related:

• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• See more Velocity podcasts
• Sign up for the Velocity newsletter

Our conversation lasted 00:13:21. If you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. I will apologize now: Theo’s image froze a couple minutes into our conversation, but since it was our second attempt at this, and it is a conversation, I feel the content of his answers is what most of us what to hear, not whether or not he is smiling or gesturing.

• Are we splitting hairs with our terms of WebOps, DevOps, WebDev, etc? 00:00:42
• What are the important goals developers should have in mind when building Systems that Operate? 00:01:28
• How do you define, spec and set best practices for your DevOps organization so that your whole team is working well? 00:02:38
• What does a typical day look like in the DevOps world? 00:03:39
• What are the key attributes and skills someone should have to become a skilled DevOps? 00:04:50
• What is the hardest to master for a young DevOps, security, scalability, reliability or performance?00:06:22
• Is DevOps more of a craft, discipline, methodology, way of thinking, what is it?00:07:35
• If your DevOps is operating well, do you notice it and how do you measure it if all is well?00:08:47
• What do you think the most significant thing a sharp DevOps person can contribute to an organization, and how do they know if they have achieved excellence? 00:10:16

If you would like to hear Theo speak on “It’s All About Telemetry,” he is presenting at the 2012 Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday 6/26/12 at 1:00pm. We hope to see you there.

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

Related:

• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• See more Velocity podcasts
• Sign up for the Velocity newsletter

It seems like a lot of first time authors, experienced authors, editors, publishers, and publishing technologists lose sleep pondering DRM and piracy issues surrounding digital content and its availability and prevalence on the web. I’d like to say to them all, “chill out and sleep.” This is not a flash-in-the-pan situation and there are some very simple things you can do to prosper. This issue has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time to come.

A couple years ago, David Pogue was gracious enough to participate in an experiment on DRM-free content in the wild with O’Reilly. You can read his conclusions here, but his bottom-line was this:

“The results? It was true. The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying. The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall. In fact, sales rose slightly during that year. That’s not a perfect, all-variables-equal experiment, of course; any number of factors could explain the results. But for sure, it wasn’t the disaster I’d feared.”

I think this is a pretty important revelation. Sales increased during the year Pogue’s work was intentionally let out DRM-free. I wonder what would have happened if we had a banner ad on Pirate Bay during the experiment that indicated you could get the print and digital versions of “XYZ title” at our retail price of the print product for anyone using the coupon “Pirate-bay.” My point here is we need to get creative with piracy and how to work with it instead of thinking DRM, lawyers, or search engine blocks will address the problem.

Most recently, Eric Freeman and Beth Robson, authors of “Head First Design Patterns,” “Head First HTML” and “Head First HTML5 Programming” re-kindled an old thread with O’Reilly about DRM and piracy. This is a thread that most authors feel strongly about. You can read an interesting take on this from four years ago here.

This time Beth opened the discussion with:

“I’m already seeing ‘HF HTML5 Programming’ popping up on illegal file sharing sites. This morning: http://bit.ly/IM7I84. Is O’Reilly on this? Do you know what they do about it, if anything? I realize we can’t stop it but just curious.”

And Eric chimed in with:

“When I checked a day or so after the digital copy went live they were the top searches in Google. While you may not be able to stop Pirate’s Bay, etc. You should be able to have Google remove the links.”

Based on my years of publishing with O’Reilly and others, I replied:

“I disagree with you on this. I think this helps market the book. ‘HF Design Patterns’ has been one of the books that shows up most on the P2P sites, yet sells consistently well. Have you not heard Tim’s rant that piracy is not the enemy of authors, obscurity is. The people who steal, will always steal for whatever their reasons are and will figure out how to get what they want.”

Let’s dig into my reply a little deeper to see why I could make such a statement. First of all, let’s look at some numbers. When I search for ‘book torrents” there are 77,800,000 results returned by Bing from the uTorrent client. And 12,000,000 hits returned from a Google search. When I searched for “technical book torrents” there were 20,300,000 results returned from Bing and 5,180,000 results returned from Google. Further refining this search, I looked for “O’Reilly Torrents” and got 937,000 results from Bing and 23,200,000 results from Google, which reverses Bing and Google from the preceding numbers. Diving in a bit on this and searching for “Head First Design Patterns” returns this:

Notice that there are more than 69 million hits available when you search inside of uTorrent, which uses the Bing search engine. An interesting side note: I began clicking into the search pages and found as soon as I got to page 10 or so, the results change to “211-220 of 191,000 results,”‘ which is drastically different than 69 million. But the links were valid until about page 54, where I received the message “531-540 of 32,600 results” and many of the links were not for the Head First book torrent. So the long story short, there a boatload of torrents out there, but not as many as it first appears, yet I could find and download this title within seconds.

Getting out of the weeds and back to the point of this, there are plenty of available torrents for “Head First Design Patterns” and all of our Head First and O’Reilly books. But does the availability of torrents slow the sales of our books in both print and digital forms? Since 2004, O’Reilly has three Head First books in the top 15 all-time revenue generators (dollars at the cash registers), according to Nielsen Bookscan’s Technical Book reports. If we only count the books that have a sticker price under $100, Head First has three of the top 10 all time. And the last time I looked, our Head First titles dominated the top 10 titles at Safaribooksonline.com. “Design Patterns,” “Java” and “HTML” lead the way for O’Reilly in revenue generated in bookstores, revenue generated at Safari, and pirated copies on the web. Is this just a coincidence? Or is this the cost of doing business?

I believe that people who cannot afford to purchase a $50 book are likely not going to forgo other necessities so they can pay. I am pretty confident that if you did a demographic study of the people who grab torrents and unauthorized content off the Internet, the majority of them would not be economically able to pay the prices on the products. Another data point to think about is when you were in college, was the money you spent on books a good experience as you saw your beer, food, date, clothes, and incidental money fritter away on books? So here’s an interesting twist: Do these college kids go on to real jobs making real money, and do they remember the books that taught them what they needed to know? You bet. Are they more willing to purchase from that publisher in the future when they have real tangible money? You bet. Are they an early-stage marketing investment for publishers? You bet.

Here’s the rub: Some publishers may feel good that their books are not all over P2P networks, available in torrents, or DRM-free editions. But really, think about this. If nobody wants your content bad enough to get it and make it available, should you have published it? Obscurity is more of an enemy than piracy. Here is the double rub: If your content is free and on P2P networks, torrents, etc. and people are not downloading it, is it any good? Seriously. Most of these sites show the number of downloads on the page so others can see if lots of people like your content. I think it would be embarrassing if nobody wanted my works for free. As a publisher, it’d be something to make us re-evaluate our publishing plans, quickly. Again, I am looking at this as the cost of business, similar to a marketing taxation of sorts.

Adding DRM to content to deter theft… are you kidding me? Seriously, think about that. It will take a good programmer about an hour to get past most DRM, or a manual shop somewhere in the world will cut and scan the physical book and away it goes. DRM seems a bit like a Neanderthal dragging its knuckles rather than using its larger brain and brawn to move forward and past stuff that did not help the species evolve. As an industry we need to evolve past the archaic DRM that’s retarding growth and innovation in our industry. New DRM technologies are not innovation, they are a Neanderthal-like reaction. We need distribution innovation. We need learning science innovation. We need total immersion with content innovation. We need production and manufacturing innovation. At this time our industry is staring down the barrel of a powerful gun that can soon dictate the means, price, availability of content creation and distribution if we do not figure out novel ways to move forward. Can we use P2P networks and torrents to help promote and advertise our content and services? Can we think of peer distribution and payment networks that could work with us? Can we think of ways to embed links into our content that drives people back to our websites where we can engage them in many more products and services that may be more appropriate for their economic status? You may get to learn more from these people and hear the reasons why they grabbed unauthorized content. Maybe that creates an opportunity for a follow-on product or derivative.

I hope you see enough compelling reasons to go DRM-free. Because to us, DRM-free is something that the publishing industry should embrace not just for one day, but forever.

Sleep well my friends.

Photo: “Eliminate DRM by YayAdrian, on Flickr

Related

• Join us in celebrating International Day Against DRM
• All DRM related Posts on Radar by Joe Wikert
• All DRM-related articles found on O’Reilly Radar
• Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales (2009 report)
• Will Hachette Be The First Big-6 Publisher To Drop DRM On E-Books?
• Cutting their own throats
• David Pogue Revisits DRM Question about Ebooks
• Overheard: @andrewsavikas on DRM
• At TOC: Cory Doctorow to Publishers: Demand Option To *Not* Use DRM
• DRM, DMCA and Competitive Lock-In
• DRM: Dogs and Cats
• Great Rant by Cory Doctorow on Apple and DRM

Our conversation lasted nearly 20 minutes, so if you want to pinpoint any particular topic use the specific timing links noted below. The full interview is embedded at the end of this post.

• The difference between a website and a mobile website 00:00:50
• What tools are available for determining your performance benchmarks for a mobile web site? 00:03:18
• What considerations need to be taken into effect to truly build a site that performs like greased lightning? 00:05:02
• Has Google improved its Android browser to catch up with the Chrome browser? 00:07:04
• What are some of the most common mistakes or patterns that developers make when building a mobile web site? 00:08:08
• What do the two terms “mobile-first responsive web design” and “progressive enhancement” mean? 00:12:36
• How do you make progressive enhancements when one Android phone may have five different browsers? Do you have five forks of a code base? 00:13:30
• How do developers pick up best practices for mobile web development? 00:15:38
• The mobile platform keeps growing and bringing lots of change. 00:17:13

If you would like to hear Jason Grigsby speak on “Performance Implications of Responsive Web Design,” he is presenting at the 2012 Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday, June 26 at 1 pm. We hope to see you there.

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

Related:

• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• See more Velocity podcasts
• Sign up for the Velocity newsletter
• Mobile web development isn’t slowing down
• You can’t get away with a bad mobile experience anymore
• The state of speed and the quirks of mobile optimization

I recently spoke with Joshua Bixby of Strangeloop about measuring and making sense out of increased performance. Josh has presented at Velocity in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. and he always has some very interesting insights into the business of performance. Josh talks about business KPIs, metrics and business benefits of performance optimization and always has plenty of data and graphs. In our recent conversation we mostly touched on the business of speed.

Our conversation lasted just over 22 minutes. If you want to pinpoint any particular answer, you can find the specific timing below.

• A little background on Josh and Strangeloop (what is a StrangeLoop?) 00:00:26
• You’ve mentioned in your talks that we are in the middle of a couple of revolutions, what are they? 00:03:18
• When did you see an institutional need for making a business case for Web Performance Optimization? 00:05:21
• How do you benchmark a company’s web properties that are most mobile, enterprise, or Web2 oriented so you are comparing apples to apples? 00:07:38
• How do you rank variable tradeoffs that engineers will inevitably encounter with time, cost, quality, scope and performance? 00:11:25
• What is the most common cause of mobile users not staying on a site, or not purchasing? Is it performance related? 00:12:36
• Do you have any real-life examples of dramatic improvements companies have achieved through performance optimization? 00:14:54
• In your experience, what is the most important benefit a company will get through performance improvements? 00:18:56

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

Related:

• Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes
• Joshua Bixby on mobile speed, platform optimization and KPIs