- Build Quality In — an e-book collection of Continuous Delivery and DevOps experience reports from the wild. Work in progress, and a collection of accumulated experience in the new software engineering practices can’t be a bad thing.
- UX Directory — collection of awesome UX resources.
- Designing for Large-Screen Cellphones (Luke Wroblewski) — In his analysis of 1,333 observations of smartphones in use, Steven Hoober found about 75% of people rely on their thumb and 49% rely on a one-handed grip to get things done on their phones. On large screens (over four inches) those kinds of behaviors can stretch people’s thumbs well past their comfort zone as they try to reach controls positioned at the top of their device. Design advice to create interactions that don’t strain tendons or gray matter.
- fastsocket (Github) — a highly scalable socket and its underlying networking implementation of Linux kernel. With the straight linear scalability, Fastsocket can provide extremely good performance in multicore machines.
"Velocity" entries
Four short links: 28 October 2014
Continuous Delivery, UX Resources, Large-Screen Cellphone Design, and Scalable Sockets
Four short links: 13 October 2014
Angular Style, Consensus Filters, BASE Banks, and Browser Performance
- Angular JS Style Guide — I love style guides, to the point of having posted (I think) three for Angular. Reading other people’s style guides is like listening to them make-up after arguments: you learn what’s important to them, and what they regret.
- Consensus Filters — filtering out misreads and other errors to allow all agents, or robots, in the network to arrive at the same value asymptotically by only communicating with their neighbours.
- Why Banks are BASE not ACID — Consistency it turns out is not the Holy Grail. What trumps consistency is: Auditing, Risk Management, Availability.
- perfmap — front-end performance heatmap.
A foundation of empathy: The O’Reilly Radar Podcast
Putting ourselves in the shoes of the user is key to building better systems and services.
Editor’s note: you can subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast through iTunes, SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.
In this podcast episode, Tim O’Reilly talks about building systems and services for people, keeping a close eye on the end user’s experience to build better, more efficient systems that actually work for the people using them. Highlighting a quote from Jeff Sussna, O’Reilly makes a deeper connection between development and the ultimate purpose for building systems and services — user experience:
“[Jeff Sussna says in his blog post Empathy: The Essence of DevOps]: ‘It’s not about making developers and sysadmins report to the same VP. It’s not about automating all your configuration procedures. It’s not about tipping up a Jenkins server, or running your applications in the cloud, or releasing your code on Github. It’s not even about letting your developers deploy their code to a PaaS. The true essence of DevOps is empathy.’
“Understanding the other people that you work with and how you’re going to work together more effectively. That word ’empathy’ struck me and it made me connect the world of DevOps with the world of user experience design.”
Four short links: 2 October 2014
I Heart Logs, CS50 Eating The World, Meeting Transcripts, Binary Analysis
- I Heart Logs — I linked to Jay Kreps’s awesome blog post twice, and now he’s expanded it into a slim O’Reilly volume which I shall press into the hands of every engineer I meet. Have you heard the Good News?
- CS50 Record Numbers — nearly 12% of Harvard now takes Intro to CS. (via Greg Linden)
-
SayIt — open source from MySociety, a whole new way to organise, publish,
and share your transcripts. They really want to make a better experience for sharing and organising transcripts of meetings. - BAP — Binary Analysis Platform from CMU. Translates binary into assembly and then into an intermediate language which explicitly represents the side effects of assembly instructions, such as flag computations.
The promise of Promise Theory: The O’Reilly Radar Podcast
Mark Burgess chats about Promise Theory, and Geoffrey Moore discusses a modern approach to his Crossing the Chasm theory.
Editor’s note: you can subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast through iTunes,SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.
As systems become increasingly distributed and complex, it’s more important than ever to find ways to accurately describe and analyze those systems, and to formalize intent behind processes, workflows, and collaboration.
In this podcast episode, I chat with Mark Burgess, founder and CTO of CFEngine, about the origins of Promise Theory and its connection to DevOps. Read more…
Postmortems, sans finger-pointing: The O’Reilly Radar Podcast
In this episode, John Allspaw talks in-depth about blameless postmortems and creating a just culture.
Editor’s note: you can subscribe to the O’Reilly Radar Podcast through iTunes, SoundCloud, or directly through our podcast’s RSS feed.
When you’re dealing with complex systems, failure is going to happen; it’s a given. What we do after that failure, however, strongly influences whether or not that failure will happen again. The traditional response to failure is to seek out the person responsible and punish them accordingly — should they be fired? Retrained? Moved to a different position where they can’t cause such havoc again?
John Allspaw, SVP of technical operations at Etsy and co-chair of the O’Reilly Velocity Conference, argues that this “human error” approach is the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face. He explains in a blog post that at Etsy, their approach it to “view mistakes, errors, slips, lapses, etc., with a perspective of learning.” To that end, Etsy practices “blameless postmortems” that focus more on the narrative of how something happened rather than who was behind it, and that remove punishment as an outcome of an investigation.
Four short links: 14 August 2014
Ceramic 3D Printing, Robo Proofs, Microservice Fail, and Amazing Graphics Tweaks
- $700 Ceramic-Spitting 3D Printer (Make Magazine) — ceramic printing is super interesting, not least because it doesn’t fill the world with plastic glitchy bobbleheads.
- Mathematics in the Age of the Turing Machine (Arxiv) — a survey of mathematical proofs that rely on computer calculations and formal proofs. (via Victoria Stodden)
- Failing at Microservices — deconstructed a failed stab at microservices. Category three engineers also presented a significant problem to our implementation. In many cases, these engineers implemented services incorrectly; in one example, an engineer had literally wrapped and hosted one microservice within another because he didn’t understand how the services were supposed to communicate if they were in separate processes (or on separate machines). These engineers also had a tough time understanding how services should be tested, deployed, and monitored because they were so used to the traditional “throw the service over the fence”to an admin approach to deployment. This basically lead to huge amounts of churn and loss of productivity.
- Transient Attributes for High-Level Understanding and Editing of Outdoor Scenes — computer vision doing more amazing things: annotate scenes (e.g., sunsets, seasons), train, then be able to adjust images. Tweak how much sunset there is in your pic? Wow.
Velocity highlights (video bonus!)
A collection of must-see keynotes from Velocity Santa Clara, with bonus videos of some of the best sessions.
Editor’s note: this post originally appeared on Steve Souders’ blog; it is published here with permission.
We’re in the quiet period between Velocity Santa Clara and Velocity New York. It’s a good time to look back at what we saw and look forward to what we’ll see this September 15-17 in NYC.
Velocity Santa Clara was our biggest show to date. There was more activity across the attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors than I’d experienced at any previous Velocity. A primary measure of Velocity is the quality of the speakers. As always, the keynotes were livestreamed — the people who tuned in were not disappointed. I recommend reviewing all of the keynotes from the Velocity YouTube Playlist. All of them were great, but here’s a collection of some of my favorites.
Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler
Start. Here. Scott Hanselman’s walk through the evolution of the web and cloud computing is informative and hilarious:
Four short links: 4 July 2014
Deleted Transparency, Retro Theme, MPA Suckage, and Ultrasonic Comms
- The Flipside of the Right To Be Forgotten (Business Insider) — deletion requests were granted for a former politician who wanted to remove links to a news article about his behavior when previously in office – so that he can have a clean slate when running for a new position – and a man who was convicted of possessing child sexual abuse imagery.
- BOOTSTRA.386 — gorgeously retro theme for Bootstrap.
- Multi-Process Architectures Suck — detailed and painful look at the computational complexity and costs of multiprocess architectures.
- Chromecast Ultrasonic Comms — In the new system, Chromecast owners first allow support for nearby devices. A nearby device then requests access to the Chromecast, and the Chromecast plays an ultrasonic sound through the connected TV’s speakers. The sound is then picked up by the microphone in the device, which allows it to pair with the TV. (via Greg Linden)
Revisiting “What is DevOps”
If all companies are software companies, then all companies must learn to manage their online operations.
Two years ago, I wrote What is DevOps. Although that article was good for its time, our understanding of organizational behavior, and its relationship to the operation of complex systems, has grown.
A few themes have become apparent in the two years since that last article. They were latent in that article, I think, but now we’re in a position to call them out explicitly. It’s always easy to think of DevOps (or of any software industry paradigm) in terms of the tools you use; in particular, it’s very easy to think that if you use Chef or Puppet for automated configuration, Jenkins for continuous integration, and some cloud provider for on-demand server power, that you’re doing DevOps. But DevOps isn’t about tools; it’s about culture, and it extends far beyond the cubicles of developers and operators. As Jeff Sussna says in Empathy: The Essence of DevOps:
…it’s not about making developers and sysadmins report to the same VP. It’s not about automating all your configuration procedures. It’s not about tipping up a Jenkins server, or running your applications in the cloud, or releasing your code on Github. It’s not even about letting your developers deploy their code to a PaaS. The true essence of DevOps is empathy.