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Velocity Report: Building a DevOps culture

By Mandi Walls
April 16, 2013

Operations professionals live in a wind tunnel. If you can imagine one of those game show glass boxes, where a contestant stands inside, the door shuts, and money blows around in a whirlwind, you’ve got a good idea of what …

Aereo’s copyright solution: intentional inefficiency

By Mac Slocum
April 3, 2013

Aereo, an online service that sends free over-the-air television broadcasts to subscribers, scored a big win in court this week. At first glance, it would seem the service has to violate copyright. Aereo is grabbing TV content without paying for …

Four short links: 6 March 2013

By Nat Torkington
March 7, 2013

High Performance Networking in Google Chrome — far more than you ever wanted to know about how Chrome is so damn fast. Tactical Chat — how the military uses IRC to wage war. http-console — a REPL loop for HTTP. …

Four short links: 18 December 2012

By Nat Torkington
December 18, 2012

Credibility Ranking of Tweets During High Impact Events (PDF) — interesting research. Situational awareness information is information that leads to gain in the knowledge or update about details of the event, like the location, people aff ected, causes, etc. We found …

Four short links: 11 October 2012

By Nat Torkington
October 11, 2012

ABalytics — dead simple A/B testing with Google Analytics. (via Dan Mazzini) Fastest Rubik Cube Solver is Made of Lego — it takes less than six seconds to solve the cube. Watch the video, it’s … wow. Also cool is …

Six themes from Velocity Europe

By Steve Souders
October 9, 2012

By Steve Souders and John Allspaw More than 700 performance and operations engineers were in London last week for Velocity Europe 2012. Below, Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw note high-level themes from across the various tracks (especially the …

DNA: The perfect backup medium

By Timothy M. O'Brien
August 20, 2012

It wasn’t enough for Dr. George Church to help Gilbert “discover” DNA sequencing 30 years ago, create the foundations for genomics, create the Personal Genome Project, drive down the cost of sequencing,  and start humanity down the road of synthetic biology. …

Four short links: 3 August 2012

By Nat Torkington
August 3, 2012

Urban Camouflage Workshop — Most of the day was spent crafting urban camouflage intended to hide the wearer from the Kinect computer vision system. By the end of the workshop we understood how to dress to avoid detection for the …

Faster and stronger: Looking back on Velocity 2012

Faster and stronger: Looking back on Velocity 2012
By Mike Loukides
July 10, 2012

Mike Loukides highlights talks from Velocity 2012, including: Bryan McQuade on the importance of understanding the full stack, Dr. Richard Cook on failures and complex systems, Mike Christian on redundant data centers, and John Rauser on the value of outliers.

Velocity Profile: Schlomo Schapiro

By Mac Slocum
June 12, 2012

A profile of web operations and performance expert Schlomo Schapiro, systems architect and open source evangelist at ImmobilienScout24.

Four short links: 8 June 2012

By Nat Torkington
June 8, 2012

HAproxy -- high availability proxy, cf Varnish. Opera Reviews SPDY -- thoughts on the high-performance HTTP++ from a team with experience implementing their own protocols. Section 2 makes a good intro to the features of SPDY if you've not been keeping up. Jetpants -- Tumblr's automation toolkit for handling monstrously large MySQL database topologies. (via Hacker News) LeakedIn --...

What is DevOps?

What is DevOps?
By Mike Loukides
June 7, 2012

NoOps, DevOps — no matter what you call it, operations won't go away. Ops experts and development teams will jointly evolve to meet the challenges of delivering reliable software to customers.

A crazy awesome gaming infrastructure

A crazy awesome gaming infrastructure
By Mike Hendrickson
June 6, 2012

How do you bridge the gap between IT and business while building a gaming infrastructure that scales? Sarah Novotny addresses that question in this Velocity podcast.

IPv6 day and the state of the edge

IPv6 day and the state of the edge
By Jim Stogdill
June 6, 2012

Will IPv6 give us back an open Internet? Or has address scarcity already set the course for gravitational determinism and continued centralization?

The software professional vs the software artist

By Mike Loukides
June 5, 2012

Developer "artists" who think they're too good to address vulnerabilities in operating systems and applications must shoulder blame for insecure systems.

Velocity Profile: Kate Matsudaira

By Mac Slocum
June 5, 2012

A profile of web operations and performance expert Kate Matsudaira, vice president of engineering at Decide.com.

Developer Week in Review: The overhead of insecure infrastructure

Developer Week in Review: The overhead of insecure infrastructure
By James Turner
June 1, 2012

The news is constantly full of companies and organizations falling victim to exploits. Software developers spend a great deal of our time defending against them. But why should they have to bother at all?

Which is easier to tune, humans or machines?

Which is easier to tune, humans or machines?
By Mike Hendrickson
May 30, 2012

In this Velocity podcast, Kate Matsudaira discusses the human side of performance and operations, including how to teach people to address time, cost, quality and scope.

Four short links: 24 May 2012

By Nat Torkington
May 24, 2012

Last Saturday My Son Found His People at the Maker Faire -- aww to the power of INFINITY. Dictionaries Linking Words to Concepts (Google Research) -- Wikipedia entries for concepts, text strings from searches and the oppressed workers down the Text Mines, and a count indicating how often the two were related. Magic Wand (Kickstarter) -- I don't want...

Schlomo Schapiro on continuous delivery platforms

Schlomo Schapiro on continuous delivery platforms
By Mike Hendrickson
May 23, 2012

Schlomo Schapiro talks about what it's like to develop a continuous delivery platform, including the tech stack and the organizational challenges.

JavaScript and Dart: Can we do better?

JavaScript and Dart: Can we do better?
By Simon St. Laurent
May 17, 2012

O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent talked with Google's Seth Ladd about the challenges of improving the web.  How can we build on JavaScript's ubiquity while addressing performance, team, and scale issues?

Velocity Profile: Justin Huff

By Mac Slocum
May 16, 2012

A profile of web operations and performance expert Justin Huff, software engineer at PicMonkey and formerly of Google/Picnik.

John Allspaw on DevOps

John Allspaw on DevOps
By Mike Hendrickson
May 15, 2012

John Allspaw discusses DevOps in high-volume web companies and the importance of cooperation between development and operations.

Top Stories: May 7-11, 2012

Top Stories: May 7-11, 2012
By Mac Slocum
May 11, 2012

This week on O'Reilly: We learned how the Velocity Conference site got a big makeover thanks to Velocity practices, Liliana Bounegru offered a brief history of data journalism, and Joe Wikert explained how booksellers can reinvent themselves.

Jesse Robbins on the state of infrastructure automation

By Timothy M. O'Brien
May 11, 2012

OpsCode chief community officer Jesse Robbins discusses cloud infrastructure automation and the most surprising use of Chef he's seen so far.

O'Reilly Radar Show 5/10/12: The surprising rise of JavaScript

O'Reilly Radar Show 5/10/12: The surprising rise of JavaScript
By Mac Slocum
May 10, 2012

Fluent Conference co-chair Peter Cooper explains why and how JavaScript rose to prominence. Also, Steve Souders points the way to web performance tools and techniques.

Commerce Weekly: The competitive push toward mobile payment

Commerce Weekly: The competitive push toward mobile payment
By Jenn Webb
May 10, 2012

The New York Times takes a look at the different mobile payment solutions, MasterCard surveys the globe to see who's ready for mobile payments, and the CEO of i-Cue Design suggests a faster mobile shopping solution. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Understanding Mojito

Understanding Mojito
By Simon St. Laurent
May 10, 2012

O'Reilly editor Simon St. Laurent talked with Yahoo's Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz about the possibilities Node opened and Mojito exploits. Yahoo's Mojito is a different kind of framework: all JavaScript, but running on both the client and the server.

Theo Schlossnagle on DevOps as a career

Theo Schlossnagle on DevOps as a career
By Mike Hendrickson
May 9, 2012

In this Velocity podcast, OmniTI CEO Theo Schlossnagle discusses the skills of DevOps professionals and knowing how you've achieved excellence in the field.

Velocity Profile: Nicole Sullivan

By Mac Slocum
May 9, 2012

Nicole Sullivan discusses her favorite CSS tools and who she follows in the web ops & performance world.

Giving the Velocity website a performance makeover

Giving the Velocity website a performance makeover
By Tony Quartarolo
May 9, 2012

Learn how producers slimmed down the Velocity conference site, cutting the site's load time by 3.5 seconds and dropping 49% of the page weight.

jQuery took on a common problem and then grew through support

By Mac Slocum
May 8, 2012

Rather than accept the deep flaws of cross-browser functionality, John Resig did something about them. In this video interview from Velocity 2011, Resig discusses his initial goals for jQuery, the complexity of mobile, and why JavaScript has become a critical development tool.

Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner on mobile web design

Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner on mobile web design
By Mike Hendrickson
May 3, 2012

In this Velocity podcast, the co-authors of "Head First Mobile Web" discuss mobile website optimization, mobile design considerations, and common mobile development mistakes.

Velocity Profile: Sergey Chernyshev

By Mac Slocum
May 2, 2012

A profile of web operations and performance expert Sergey Chernyshev, director of web systems and applications at truTV and organizer of the New York Web Performance Meetup Group.

Want to get ahead in DevOps? Expand your expertise and emotional intelligence

By Jenn Webb
May 1, 2012

In this interview, Decide VP of engineering Kate Matsudaira discusses how and why developer jobs are changing. She also offers four practical strategies for communicating with non-geeks.

Design your website for a graceful fail

Design your website for a graceful fail
By Jenn Webb
April 26, 2012

A failure in secondary content doesn't need to take down an entire website. Here, Etsy's Mike Brittain explains how to build resilience into UIs and allow for graceful failures.

Velocity Podcast Series - Joshua Bixby on The Business of Performance

By Mike Hendrickson
April 25, 2012

Josh talks about Business KPIs, metrics and business benefits of performance optimization and always has plenty of data and graphs. In our conversation we touch on mostly on the business of speed.

Steve Souders on Web Performance Optimization

By Mike Hendrickson
April 19, 2012

Steve Souders on the State of Web Performance and Optimization and Velocity.

Strata Week: The rise of the robot essay graders

By Audrey Watters
April 19, 2012

In this week's data news, a look at the performance of automated essay-grading software, scaling Instagram, and an audit of the UK government's open data initiative.

Strata Week: The rise of the robot essay graders

Strata Week: The rise of the robot essay graders
By Audrey Watters
April 19, 2012

In this week's data news, a look at the performance of automated essay-grading software, scaling Instagram, and an audit of the UK government's open data initiative.

Velocity Profile: Hooman Beheshti

By Mac Slocum
April 18, 2012

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.

MySQL in 2012: Report from Percona Live

By Andy Oram
April 14, 2012

Contrasting deployments at craigslit and Pinterest, trends, commercial offerings, and more

Complexity fails: A lesson from storage simplification

Complexity fails: A lesson from storage simplification
By Randy Bias
April 11, 2012

Simple systems scale effectively, while complex systems struggle to overcome the multiplicative effect of potential failure points. This shows us why the most reliable and scalable clouds are those made up of fewer, simpler parts.

Operations, machine learning and premature babies

By Mike Loukides
April 9, 2012

Machine learning and access to huge amounts of data allowed IBM to make an important discovery about premature infants. If web operations teams could capture everything — network data, environmental data, I/O subsystem data, etc. — what would they find out?

Operations, machine learning and premature babies

By Mike Loukides
April 9, 2012

Machine learning and access to huge amounts of data allowed IBM to make an important discovery about premature infants. If web operations teams could capture everything — network data, environmental data, I/O subsystem data, etc. — what would they find out?

Four short links: 23 March 2012

By Nat Torkington
March 23, 2012

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,...

Four short links: 21 March 2012

By Nat Torkington
March 21, 2012

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...

Four short links: 2 March 2012

By Nat Torkington
March 2, 2012

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...

Four short links: 21 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 21, 2012

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...

Strata Week: The data behind Yahoo's front page

By Audrey Watters
February 16, 2012

In this week's data news: Yahoo visualizes its front page traffic and demographics, why Tumblr is tougher to scale than Twitter, and a look at what you need to consider as you build visualizations.


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