- 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.
"performance" entries
Velocity Profile: Hooman Beheshti
Web ops and performance questions with Hooman Beheshti, VP of technology at Strangeloop.
Hooman Beheshti, the vice president of technology at Strangeloop, talks about how he got into web ops and performance, the biggest problems he's encountered, and the tools he relies on most.
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: 2 March 2012
Robotics for Kids, Benchmarking Context Needed, Javascript Time Series Graphs, and Amazing Programming Video
- Interview: Hanno Sander on Robotics (Circuit Cellar) — this is what Mindstorms wants to be when it grows up. AAA++ for teaching kids. Hanno is a Kiwi Foo Camper.
- Context Needed: Benchmarks — Benchmarks fall into a few common traps because of under-reporting in context and lack of detail in results. The typical benchmark report doesn’t reveal the benchmark’s goal, full details of the hardware and software used, how the results were edited if at all, how to reproduce the results, detailed reporting on the system’s performance during the test, and an interpretation and explanation of the results. (via Jesse Robbins)
- Morris.js (GitHub) — a lightweight library that uses jQuery and Raphaël to make drawing time-series graphs easy.
- Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle (Vimeo) — the first 20m has amazing demos of a coding environment with realtime feedback. Must see this! (via Sacha Judd)
Four short links: 21 February 2012
jQuery Performance, George Dyson, VLC 2.0, and Power Laws
- Stop Paying Your jQuery Tax (Sam Saffron) — performance advice for front-end developers. The faster your site responds, the more customers will use it.
- George Dyson Interviewed (Wired) — a different perspective on computing, worth reading.
- VLC 2.0.0 — VLC lets you bypass manufacturers’ designed-in brokenness so your computer can play media. Glad to see it still being actively developed.
- Critical Truth About Power Laws (Science Magazine) — Although power laws have been reported in areas ranging from finance and molecular biology to geophysics and the Internet, the data are typically insufficient and the mechanistic insights are almost always too limited for the identification of power-law behavior to be scientifically useful (see the figure). Indeed, even most statistically “successful” calculations of power laws offer little more than anecdotal value. (no PDF available unless you pay, because that’s how great science works)
Four short links: 13 February 2012
Indie Businesses, Frontend Sluggards, Beautiful Graphics, and Big Data Patterns
- Rise of the Independents (Bryce Roberts) — companies that don’t take VC money and instead choose to grow organically: indies. +1 for having a word for this.
- The Performance Golden Rule (Steve Souders) — 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. Check out his graphs showing where load times come from for various popular sites. The backend responds quickly, but loading all the Javascript and images and CSS and embedded autoplaying videos and all that kerfuffle takes much much longer.
- Starry Night Comes to Life — wow, beautiful, must-see.
- MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases — In this article I digest a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting.
Four short links: 3 February 2012
Investigating Page Speed, The Web Commons, Community and Popularity, and GPL Enforcement
- Page Speed (Google Code) — an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.
- What Commons Do We Wish For? (John Battelle) — trying to understand what the Internet would look like if we don’t pay attention to our core shared values. Excellent piece from jbat, who is thinking and writing in preparation for another book.
- The Trouble with Popularity — this blog post on StackOverflow does a great job of explaining why moderators are necessary, and why it’s not in everyone’s interest to give them what they want. Sad to see this come out just as Yahoo! continues to gut and fillet Flickr, which used to be the benchmark for all things community.
- The Ongoing Fight Against GPL Enforcement — interesting! Software Freedom Conservancy, who have pursued several cases against manufacturers who ship GPLed code but do not release their source and modifications to it, have used busybox as a fulcrum for their GPL code release lever. Manufacturers may be attempting to replace busybox with non-GPLed code to take away the fulcrum. In other news, engineering metaphors are like a massless body at light speed before the bigbang: unknowable.
Velocity Newsletter: January 19, 2012
Slow performance plagues a major newspaper's website. Old operations advice holds true.
Highlights from the 1/19/12 edition of the Strata newsletter include: Slow download times prevent a major media organization from innovating, and Velocity co-chair John Allspaw unearths some pearls of wisdom from his archive.
What's on the agenda for Velocity Europe
Steve Souders previews Velocity Europe 2011.
Velocity co-chair Steve Souders highlights a number of Velocity Europe speakers and sessions that caught his attention.
What’s on the agenda for Velocity Europe
Steve Souders previews Velocity Europe 2011.
Velocity co-chair Steve Souders highlights a number of Velocity Europe speakers and sessions that caught his attention.