Defining the term: I recently used a term and was hit with a lot of out-of-band requests for explanation. It’s a good one and excellent food for thought.
ywahusty (yuh-wuh-hus-tee): you will always have users smarter than you.
This basic concept is one of sound, pragmatic systems engineering that might appear to fly in the face of traditional product engineering… but doesn’t.
In traditional product engineering, there is a goal to produce a product that is both accessible and useful to the largest subset of the predefined audience of the product.
I don’t know now many times I’ve tried to eyeball a graph from this week against a graph from last week. This is both painful and senseless as my eyeballs simply aren’t that good. Enter “the right way to do it.” Bliss.
I used to export data into Excel and do linear regressions on it… How I have no need. I am happier person and people like me more.
Here’s how we made capacity planning easier for everyone.
What does it mean to be a database administrator? It means more than just respecting data in a room full of engineers and analysts that do not -- it means bending them to your will and making them respect it, too. It means knowing when people's concept of sacrosanct data integrity and consistency can be thrown out the window and letting those people know that, this time, they can cope with inaccuracy or volatility.
Slides are here, get 'em while they're hot.
There's no excuse these days for crappy web performance. The low hanging fruit is just too low. It is trivial to make a web site that loads fast for users. Do it. If you don't know how, you should come to my Web Performance Boot Camp tutorial at ApacheCon. Make you site fast — no excuses.
JSON sucks. Don't get me wrong, I love the simplicity of it. It's simple, it's easy, it's portable, it's ubiquitous at this point. None of that means it doesn't suck. Outside of Javascript (hence the portability), JSON itself is limited to native types in the grammar:
null object (like a hash) array string integer (signed 32bit) number (double) boolean Really? It's 2010 and we're all flocking to a grammar where we can only accurately represent integers up to 231-1.
