- BitCoin Watch — news and market analysis for this artificial currency. (If you’re outside the BitCoin world wondering wtf the fuss is all about try We Use Coins for a gentle primer and then Is BitCoin a Good Idea? for the case against) (via Andy Baio)
- Time Capsule — send your Flickr photos from a year ago. I love that technology helps us connect not just with other people right now, but with ourselves in the future. Compare TwitShift and Foursquare and Seven Years Ago. (via Really Interesting Group)
- HTTP Archive Mobile — mobile performance data. The top 100 web pages average out at 271kb vs 401kb for their desktop incarnations, which still seems unjustifiably high to me.
- Skype at Conferences — The two editors of the book were due to lead the session but were at the wrong ends of a skype three way video conference which stuttered into a dalekian half life without really quite making the breakthrough into comprehensibility. After various attempts to rewire, reconfigure and reboot, we gave up and had what turned into a good conversation among the dozen people round the table in London. Conference organizers, take note: Skype at conferences is a recipe for fail.
ENTRIES TAGGED "ops"
Happy SysAdmin Appreciation Day!
Did you do anything on the web today? Thank a SysAdmin.
If you are reading this (or any other) page, sending a message, watching a video, reading an email, or doing anything else that touches the web, you can thank a SysAdmin.
Velocity 2011 retrospective
Resilience engineering and data's role in performance are key trends in web ops.
A number of emerging themes are defining the web operations world, including: resilience engineering, new approaches to failure, and the role data plays in boosting performance.
Velocity 2011 debrief
Steve Souders weighs in on Velocity 2011 and looks ahead to upcoming Velocity events.
This was Velocity's fourth year, and while every year has seen significant growth, the 2011 conference felt like a tremendous step forward in all areas.
Velocity 2011
A tribe of web performance and operations pros is pushing the web forward.
As we approach the fourth Velocity conference, here's a look at how the web performance and operations communities came together, what they've done to improve the web experience, and the work that lies ahead.
The state of speed and the quirks of mobile optimization
Steve Souders on browser wars, site speed, and the HTTP Archive.
In this interview, Google performance evangelist and Velocity co-chair Steve Souders discusses browser competition, the differences between mobile and desktop optimization, and his hopes for the HTTP Archive.
Four short links: 20 May 2011
Digital Forex, Blasts from the Past, Mobile Web Performance, Skype at Conferences
How resilience engineering applies to the web world
John Allspaw on resilience engineering's role in web development and operations.
Certain high risk industries — aviation, space travel,healthcare — use resilience engineering to investigate failures. Etsy vice president John Allspaw says the same concepts have a place in web engineering.
How the cloud helps Netflix
Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft on the benefits of a cloud infrastructure.
Netflix moved some of its services into Amazon's cloud last year. In this interview, Netflix cloud architect Adrian Cockcroft says the move was about building a scalable product and paying down technical debt.
Four short links: 29 April 2011
Gamification's Failures, Crowdsourced Clinical Study, Traceability, and Faster Web
- Kathy Sierra Nails Gamification — I rarely link to things on O’Reilly sites, and have never before linked to something on Radar, but the comments here from Kathy Sierra are fantastic. She nails what makes me queasy about shallow gamification behaviours: replacing innate rewards with artificial ones papers over shitty products/experiences instead of fixing them, and don’t get people to a flow state. what is truly potentially motivating for its own sake (like getting people to try snowboarding the first few times… The beer may be what gets them there, but the feeling of flying through fresh powder is what sustains it, but only if we quit making it Just About The Beer and frickin teach them to fly). (via Jim Stogdill)
- Patient Driven Social Network Refutes Study, Publishes Its Own Results — The health-data-sharing website PatientsLikeMe published what it is calling a “patient-initiated observational study” refuting a 2008 report that found the drug lithium carbonate could slow the progression of the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS. The new findings were published earlier this week in the journal Nature Biotechnology. (via mthomps)
- Corporate Transparency — learn where, when and by whom your chocolate bar was made, from which chocolate stock, etc. This kind of traceability and provenance information is underrated in business. (via Jim Stogdill)
- SPDY — Google’s effort to replace HTTP with something faster. It has been the protocol between Chrome and Google’s servers, now they hope it will go wider. All connections are encrypted and compressed out of the box.
Developing countries and Open Compute
While developing countries may benefit from Open Compute, bigger issues need to be addressed first.
The potential for Open Compute to benefit developing countries was mentioned during a
panel discussion that followed the project's announcement. Intrigued, I turned to Benetech CEO Jim Fruchterman for more on Open Compute's utility in developing nations.
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