- Cache Them If You Can (Steve Souders) — the percentage of resources that are cacheable has increased 4% during the past year. Over that same time the number of requests per page has increased 12% and total transfer size has increased 24%.
- Natural — MIT-licensed general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, string similarity, and some inflection are currently supported. (via Javascript Weekly)
- How Millennials Search — Statistically significant findings suggest that millennial generation Web searchers proceed erratically through an information search process, make only a limited attempt to evaluate the quality or validity of information gathered, and may perform some level of ‘backfilling’ or adding sources to a research project before final submission of the work. Never let old people tell you that “digital natives” actually know what they’re doing.
- Walmart Buys A Facebook App for Calendar Access (Ars Technica) — The Social Calendar app and its file of 110 million birthdays and other events, acquired from Newput Corp., will give Walmart the ability to expand its efforts to dig deeper into the lives of customers. Interesting to think that by buying a well-loved app, a company could get access to your Facebook details whether you Like them or not.
ENTRIES TAGGED "devops"
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.
Velocity Profile: Kate Matsudaira
Web ops and performance questions with Kate Matsudaira.
A profile of web operations and performance expert Kate Matsudaira, vice president of engineering at Decide.com.
Velocity Profile: Justin Huff
Web ops and performance questions with PicMonkey's Justin Huff.
A profile of web operations and performance expert Justin Huff, software engineer at PicMonkey and formerly of Google/Picnik.
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.
Want to get ahead in DevOps? Expand your expertise and emotional intelligence
Kate Matsudaira on the changes developers face.
In this interview, Decide VP of engineering Kate Matsudaira discusses how and why developer jobs are changing. She also offers four practical strategies for communicating with non-geeks.
Steve Souders on Web Performance Optimization
Why "even faster" matters in the web performance and optimization world.
Steve Souders on the state of web performance, optimization and velocity.
Four short links: 23 March 2012
Caching Pages, Node NLP, Digital Native are Clueless, and Wal-Mart Loves Your Calendar
Four short links: 21 March 2012
Data Journalism, Fast Web Servers, Android App Inventor, and Daily Deal Dirt
- S0rce — gorgeous infographics. They purport to let you Think for Yourself which is bald-faced bullshit: the choice of which data to present, and the invisible collection and curation practices behind the data, is the choice of what story to tell and what it will say. That said, it’s wonderful to see the numbers (and they are attributed) behind the Republican Primary and Copyright and Piracy Legislation.
- Modern HTTP Servers are Fast — I remember when the best web engineering in the world would still fall over if a box got more than 10 hits/second. Yes, yes, I’m writing this on my grandpa box. Check out the hardware specs of the box these numbers are from.
- MIT App Inventor — web-based app designer. Does not appear to be open source. There is no long-term sustainability for this kind of development environment: when MIT decide “nah screw it, not going to run this any more” or “hmm, maybe we’ll charge for it”, you’re boned–you can download the “source” to your app in a zip file but AppInventor is the only dev environment which can consume it. I hope it’ll become the awesome and easy dev environment that Android needs, but I hope they prevent it from being a dead end.
- Daily Deals: Prediction, Social Diffusion, and Reputational Ramifications — we consider the effects of daily deals on the longer-term reputation of merchants, based on their Yelp reviews before and after they run a daily deal. Our analysis shows that while the number of reviews increases significantly due to daily deals, average rating scores from reviewers who mention daily deals are 10% lower than scores of their peers on average. (via Greg Linden)
Four short links: 8 March 2012
Compete on Convenience, Minimal Viable Operating System, Awesome Font, Collaboration Integration
- Add Torrent Links to IMDB (Userscripts) — a glimpse at what the Internet could look like: from the site you research movies on, with one click you could then launch the download. If only the company that ran the movie research site had rights to the OneClick patent and the ability to offer movies for download. Oh wait, those aren’t the barriers. If only the movie companies would cease being nutjobs insisting on flogging their DRM-hobbled nags when the black market has x264 racehorses for less. They’re not competing on price, they’re not competing on convenience, they’re competing on the expected value of litigation. Now *that’s* a business model!
- JeOS — I hadn’t heard this term before: Just Enough Operating System. Take a standard distro, and strip it down to the bare essentials that you actually need.
- Font Awesome — a font with a zillion pictograms and icons. “An iconic font designed for use with Twitter Bootstrap”.
- Collabograte — a collection of integration recipes for collaboration tools so you aren’t broken on the “how do I get this thing set up with LDAP auth?” wheel which others have reinvented with their nose to the mixed metaphor grindstone. (via Kartik Subbarao)
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