All Things Distributed

SEPTEMBER 29, 2016

In the past voice interfaces were seen as gimmicks, or a nuisance for driving “hands-free.” The Amazon Echo and Alexa have completely changed that perception. Voice is now seen as potentially the most important interface to interact with the digitally connected world. From home automation to commerce, from news organizations to government agencies, from financial services to healthcare, everyone is working on the best way is to interact with their services if voice is the interface.

Artificial Intelligence 126

Artificial Intelligence Healthcare AWS Government 126

Speed Curve

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

Often when monitoring and debugging site performance we focus on network activity and individual resources, but what about the CPU? As more and more sites switch to using large Javascript frameworks and manipulating the page using Javascript, the execution time this code takes and the available CPU can instead become the performance bottleneck. CPU usage for all Chrome tests.

Monitoring 84

Monitoring Testing Mobile Availability 84

The Polyglot Developer

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

Not too long ago I released a time-based one-time password manager called OTP Safe to Google Play and iTunes. That particular application was built with Ionic Framework and I even wrote a tutorial explaining how to make a similar 2FA manager with Ionic 2. Being a hybrid mobile application, there were some performance limitations that came with the Ionic 2 application.

Mobile 59

Mobile Google Performance Development 59

Professor Beekums

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

Switching costs are an important part of software development. When my software relies on one service, the amount of time I have to spend moving it to another service is called a switching cost. In general, you want these to be as low as possible. The reason is that if the service you are dependent on ever becomes unsatisfactory or even harmful to you, then you need to be able to switch to a competitor service.

Software 55

Software Software Development 55

Alex Russell

SEPTEMBER 12, 2016

Since Frances and I published a blog post last year introducing Progressive Web Apps , a healthy conversation has started about what is and isn’t a PWA. There are a lot of opinions and many shades of gray. What are the hard requirements? Which requirements are marginal? What’s aspirational? This article outlines these requirements, attempts to classify them, and provides a baseline for “what is a Progressive Web App?

Mobile 54

Mobile Network Education Design 54

Testlodge

SEPTEMBER 22, 2016

We’ve all been there… you just released a small change into production and KaBOOM! Customers are writing in unavailable to connect to your app, errors are surfacing, and your team is scrambling to figure out what went wrong and working to roll back changes. Needless to say, things just aren’t going as expected. In this post, we’re going to continue our series on types of software testing and take a look at regression testing.

Testing 51

Testing Software Software Strategy 51

All Things Distributed

SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

I am very grateful that I have had the opportunity to meet with President Shimon Peres several times. Especially the first time, which was a 1:1 in his presidential residence, was an unforgettable experience. After I explained in 5 minutes the power of cloud for unlocking digital business building for everyone, he went on a lecture of half an hour how bringing economic prosperity to the region was crucial to achieving a long lasting peace.

Cloud 101

Cloud 101

The Polyglot Developer

SEPTEMBER 26, 2016

Lately I’ve been working a lot with iBeacons and Raspberry Pi Internet of Things (IoT) devices. I’ve been building an office monitor for logging foot traffic around the office. I planted a few Raspberry Pi devices around the office and distributed some Gimbal iBeacons to a few of my coworkers so I could determine what part of the office experiences the most heat.

IoT 56

IoT Traffic Internet Internet 56

Tim Kadlec

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

I remember sitting around with a few friends at Chrome Dev Summit last year. The conversation eventually turned to security. We all agreed about how massively important it was, but we also each acknowledged that it’s not trivial to do correctly. It’s not the most accessible topic and the tooling and standards can be a bit unwieldy. Since that time, Let’s Encrypt came out of beta and did a lot to really simplify the process of moving sites to HTTPS.

Open Source 49

Open Source Code Performance Processing 49

SQL Server According to Bob

SEPTEMBER 1, 2016

I was approached to revisit the details of how Error Message 833 is detected and reported. SQL Server has encountered %d occurrence(s) of I/O requests taking longer than %d seconds to complete on file [%ls] in database [%ls] (%d). The OS file handle is 0x%p. The offset of the latest long I/O is: %#016I64x. Older versions of SQL Server leveraged the Lazy Writer and I/O completion callback routines to record vs report the error condition.

Servers 45

Servers Software Engineering Monitoring Database 45

Testlodge

SEPTEMBER 14, 2016

What Is Usability? Before we start to talk about Usability Testing, it’s essential to first understand what we are referring to when we say usability. When a new user first interacts with a product, he or she does so with a goal in mind – in fact, the only reason they are there is because they want to achieve something, and the product they have chosen offers a way to achieve it.

Testing 50

Testing Website Design Processing 50

The Agile Manager

SEPTEMBER 30, 2016

It's fashionable for a company to proclaim itself an ecosystem. A mobile phone company makes handsets for users and curates an app market place for developers. The virtuous cycle of an ever increasing collection of apps motivating an ever increasing population of consumers. They have the benefit of steady cash flows from existing customers and constant growth from new ones attracted by an increasingly complex array of products.

Energy 40

Energy Retail Mobile Software 40

Professor Beekums

SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

One stressful thing about software development is that it is not always straightforward. Sometimes we build things that are similar to other things we’ve done in the past. The work is more predictable because we have a clear idea on what’s involved. Think of it like writing a blog post about something you are an expert in. There’s still some challenge in structuring your words to be coherent to others, but at least you know all the main points you would want or need to cover.

Software 40

Software Software Development 40

Dean Hume

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

When I first started learning about web page performance, I always use to focus solely on the time that it took a page to load. The excitement of seeing a web page load in an instant kept me coming back for more. Whilst web page load time is an important metric to measure, it doesn't tell the whole picture. As I started to learn more about web page performance, I started to experiment with webpagetest.org and discovered the different metrics that it uses.

Speed 40

Speed Analytics Google Website 40

The Polyglot Developer

SEPTEMBER 19, 2016

Recently I’ve been using a good amount of Docker for various deployment pipelines. As everyone knows, I’m a huge Raspberry Pi fan, so I figured it would be a cool idea to bring the two together. After all, Docker was built using Golang which is cross architecture. We’re going to see how to create Docker containers on a Raspberry Pi and figure out the limitations of using Docker on IoT based architectures.

IoT 40

IoT Architecture Development 40

SQL Server According to Bob

SEPTEMBER 26, 2016

When we released Always On Availability Groups in SQL Server 2012 as a new and powerful way to achieve high availability, hardware environments included NUMA machines with low-end multi-core processors and SATA and SAN drives for storage (some SSDs). Performance issues surrounding Availability Groups typically were related to disk I/O or network speeds.

Availability 40

Availability Servers Hardware Benchmarking 40

Speed Curve

SEPTEMBER 19, 2016

If you're a performance engineer, then you're familiar with waterfall charts. They are found in browser dev tools as well as other performance services. I use multiple waterfall tools every day, but the waterfall chart I love the most is the one we've built at SpeedCurve: We've added a number of great features to our waterfall chart. In the screenshot above we see the vertical lines we've added to show Backend, Start Render, and Onload.

Network 40

Network Engineering Performance 40

Wayfair Tech

SEPTEMBER 12, 2016

PHP7 is out. This isn’t news. It’s been out since last December, with nine minor revisions since then. What’s new is that it’s serving all of Wayfair’s customer-facing traffic. Performance-wise, PHP7 is the rocket ship people said it would be. We’re nothing but pleased. If you can upgrade, you should do. Read more.

Testing 40

Testing Traffic Performance Open Source 40

Professor Beekums

SEPTEMBER 27, 2016

One stressful thing about software development is that it is not always straightforward. Sometimes we build things that are similar to other things we’ve done in the past. The work is more predictable because we have a clear idea on what’s involved. Think of it like writing a blog post about something you are an expert in. There’s still some challenge in structuring your words to be coherent to others, but at least you know all the main points you would want or need to cover.

Software 40

Software Software Development 40

Dean Hume

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

When I first started learning about web page performance, I always use to focus solely on the time that it took a page to load. The excitement of seeing a web page load in an instant kept me coming back for more. Whilst web page load time is an important metric to measure, it doesn't tell the whole picture. As I started to learn more about web page performance, I started to experiment with webpagetest.org and discovered the different metrics that it uses.

Speed 40

Speed Analytics Google Website 40

The Polyglot Developer

SEPTEMBER 5, 2016

As some of you may know, I have wireless surveillance cameras around my home. Many years back I even released an Android application called SpyFi to be able to view the video feed from these cameras. Up until recently I would have these cameras upload a sequence of images to a remote FTP server every time there was motion. The problem with this is that these were only a sequence of still-images rather than video, and the server was not free or necessarily cheap.

Wireless 40

Wireless Storage Servers Development 40

SQL Server According to Bob

SEPTEMBER 16, 2016

Yesterday I had a discussion with a customer and realized that the BCP, TDS pattern could use a bit of documentation. Customer Scenario/Question: I am using BCP.exe to import a large data set. BCP.exe takes 15 minutes to complete but I only see a few seconds for the BULK INSERT command when monitoring dm_exec_requests. What is taking so long if the BULK INSERT is only showing a few seconds in dm_exec_requests?

Traffic 40

Traffic Software Engineering Servers Monitoring 40

All Things Distributed

SEPTEMBER 29, 2016

Today, I am very excited to announce our plans to open a new AWS Region in France! Based in the Paris area, the region will provide even lower latency and will allow users who want to store their content in datacenters in France to easily do so. The new region in France will be ready for customers to use in 2017. Over the past 10 years, we have seen tremendous growth at AWS.

AWS 163

AWS IoT Internet Internet 163

Dean Hume

SEPTEMBER 21, 2016

When I first started learning about web page performance, I always use to focus solely on the time that it took a page to load. The excitement of seeing a web page load in an instant kept me coming back for more. Whilst web page load time is an important metric to measure, it doesn't tell the whole picture. As I started to learn more about web page performance, I started to experiment with webpagetest.org and discovered the different metrics that it uses.

Speed 40

Speed Analytics Google Website 40

Professor Beekums

SEPTEMBER 10, 2016

Switching costs are an important part of software development. When my software relies on one service, the amount of time I have to spend moving it to another service is called a switching cost. In general, you want these to be as low as possible. The reason is that if the service you are dependent on ever becomes unsatisfactory or even harmful to you, then you need to be able to switch to a competitor service.

Software 40

Software Software Development 40

Professor Beekums

SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

A couple of nights ago I decided to put a post I wrote in July on Hacker News just to see how well it would do. I didn’t expect much so when I suddenly saw 800 page views on my blog 30 minutes later, my first thought was “am I getting crawled by some bot?” I quickly looked at the referrals and noticed that a whole bunch came from Hacker News!

40

40

The Polyglot Developer

SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

We’re nearing the end of 2016 and there are many JavaScript frameworks available to choose from, with more on the way. Each framework offers a unique perspective of front-end development that can be very attractive to solo developers or development teams. This brings us to a very popular JavaScript framework called Ember.js. In this episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, I have guest speakers Tracy Lee and Taras Mankovski , who are both Ember experts.

Education 40

Education Technology Technology Availability 40

Professor Beekums

SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

A couple of nights ago I decided to put a post I wrote in July on Hacker News just to see how well it would do. I didn’t expect much so when I suddenly saw 800 page views on my blog 30 minutes later, my first thought was “am I getting crawled by some bot?” I quickly looked at the referrals and noticed that a whole bunch came from Hacker News!

40

40

Dean Hume

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

This year, An Event Apart and Microsoft are teaming up to bring you 10 K Apart. It's a pretty cool competition with a challenge to build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10 KB and works without JavaScript. Believe me - it's not as easy as it might seem! If you are a web developer, it's a great way to test your coding skills and see what you can build.

Website 40

Website Cache Google Code 40

Dean Hume

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

This year, An Event Apart and Microsoft are teaming up to bring you 10 K Apart. It's a pretty cool competition with a challenge to build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10 KB and works without JavaScript. Believe me - it's not as easy as it might seem! If you are a web developer, it's a great way to test your coding skills and see what you can build.

Website 40

Website Cache Google Code 40

Dean Hume

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

This year, An Event Apart and Microsoft are teaming up to bring you 10 K Apart. It's a pretty cool competition with a challenge to build a compelling web experience that can be delivered in 10 KB and works without JavaScript. Believe me - it's not as easy as it might seem! If you are a web developer, it's a great way to test your coding skills and see what you can build.

Website 40

Website Cache Google Code 40