Mike Hendrickson

Mike Hendrickson has held a variety of positions in the publishing industry including, Product Development Manager, Editor, Executive Editor, Editor-in-Chief, and Associate Publisher. Two constants are that he has always enjoyed meeting tech people and being involved with cutting-edge technologies. At O’Reilly, he is a Vice President for Content Strategy. He is the co-Author of The Best Android Apps.

Dell’s Sputnik – Git what you want

Git what you need, not what you get.

In 1957, the former Soviet Union launched an unmanned satellite call Sputnik. That launch catalyzed a political, military, technological, and scientific race to superiority between the U.S.S.R. and the United States. More than fifty years later, Dell Inc. has launched its own “Sputnik.”

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.

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Economic impact of open source on small business

Results from an in-depth study of open source's role in small and medium businesses.

A few months back, Tim O’Reilly and Hari Ravichandran, founder and CEO of Endurance International Group (EIG), had a discussion about the web hosting business. They talked specifically about how much of Hari’s success had been enabled by open source software. But Hari wasn’t just telling his success story to Tim, but rather was more interested in finding ways to give back to the communities that made his success possible. The two agreed that both companies would work together to produce a report making clear just how much of a role open source software plays in the hosting industry, and by extension, in enabling the web presence of millions of small businesses.

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!

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A crazy awesome gaming infrastructure

Sarah Novotny on building high-performance gaming platforms.

How do you bridge the gap between IT and business while building a gaming infrastructure that scales? Sarah Novotny addresses that question in this Velocity podcast.

Which is easier to tune, humans or machines?

Kate Matsudaira on the human side of performance and operations.

In this Velocity podcast, Kate Matsudaira discusses the human side of performance and operations, including how to teach people to address time, cost, quality and scope.

Schlomo Schapiro on continuous delivery platforms

A look at the tech and time that goes into continuous delivery platforms.

Schlomo Schapiro talks about what it's like to develop a continuous delivery platform, including the tech stack and the organizational challenges.

John Allspaw on DevOps

How good DevOps keeps you shipping your product.

John Allspaw discusses DevOps in high-volume web companies and the importance of cooperation between development and operations.

Theo Schlossnagle on DevOps as a career

A day in the life of DevOps, and the skills you'll need to enter the field.

In this Velocity podcast, OmniTI CEO Theo Schlossnagle discusses the skills of DevOps professionals and knowing how you've achieved excellence in the field.

DRM-Free Day, forever.

Authors and publishers need to get creative with piracy. DRM isn't the answer.

Mike Hendrickson: "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."

Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner on mobile web design

Best practices and common mistakes in mobile web development.

In this Velocity podcast, the co-authors of "Head First Mobile Web" discuss mobile website optimization, mobile design considerations, and common mobile development mistakes.

Joshua Bixby on the business of performance

Why businesses should care about speed.

In this Velocity Podcast, Strangeloop's Joshua Bixby discusses the business of speed and why web performance optimization is an institutional need.