Sutter's Mill

AUGUST 27, 2010

This month’s Effective Concurrency column, “Prefer Using Futures or Callbacks to Communicate Asynchronous Results,” is now live on DDJ’s website. From the article: This time, we’ll answer the following questions: How should we express return values and out parameters from an asynchronous function, including an active object method?

Website 40

Website Scalability Code Design 40

The Agile Manager

AUGUST 31, 2010

Writing in the FT's Long View column , James Mackintosh makes the point that hedge fund managers “appeared smarter than they really were, because they were taking a risk they did not recognize.” That’s an apt description for a lot of what goes on in IT, too. Despite all of the risks that commonly befall an IT project, we still deal with IT planning as an exercise in deterministic forecasting: if these people do these things in this sequence we will produce this software by this date.

Government 40

Government Efficiency Technology Technology 40

Tim Kadlec

AUGUST 26, 2010

Far too many projects and marketing campaigns today start by answering the question “What value does this have for our company?” The question shouldn’t center around the company, the question should center around the users. What we should be asking is “What value does this have for our users?” It’s a very simple concept, but it is one that, if adhered to, would fundamentally alter the priorities of a project.

Strategy 40

Strategy Performance 40

Tim Kadlec

AUGUST 23, 2010

I was recently working on a site whose code I was inheriting and the pages took much longer to process than I would’ve liked. Caching helped, but I wanted to get to the underlying issue so I fired up Webgrind to see if I could trace the problem. Webgrind is a freely available PHP profiling frontend that sits on top of XDebug. Using it, you can see how many times different functions are called and find what functions called them.

Cache 40

Cache Processing Code Availability 40

Tim Kadlec

AUGUST 18, 2010

The SXSW panel picking madness started last Wednesday. After attending the conference twice, I finally got around to submitting a talk this time around. If you’re interested in web performance, neuroscience, and in particular how those two areas intersect, feel free to give it the old thumbs up. Either way I’ll be attending (already registered and got the flight and hotel booked) but I’d love to get the opportunity to hear myself talk share some information while I’m ther

Design 40

Design Performance Development 40