Topic: Software Development
Why did that visitor come to your site? The answer will always surprise you. Avinash Kaushik explains that the "Highest Paid Person's Opinion" (HIPPO) often overrides expert analysis. He argues that qualitative and quantitative research, traditionally separate, are far more effective when combined, as unified web analytics reveal what's important to the individual user. He suggests we stay in perpetual beta, because nothing on the web is ever really final.
"Move fast, be bold and take risks" is what Mark Zuckerberg tries to hammer home every day. A series of news-making revelations about Facebook's strategies broke at this talk. Facebook is going to build platforms to offer access to it's 500 million users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, and John Batelle of Federated Media Publishing and answered frank and challenging questions. The result was a cascade of new strategic decisions about "all the awesome stuff" that Facebook is launching.
How do enterprise-level MySQL installations avoid spikes, pile-ups, and freeze-ups during peak operations? Crash-proof solutions are not beyond the capabilities of open-source database software, Baron Schwartz explains. He outlines Percona's enhancements to MySQL and InnoDB. They include XtraDB, a high-performance storage engine based on InnoDB, and Xtrabackup, a hot backup solution. Schwartz explains why each feature is needed to keep a scalable high-performance site up and running at peak loads.
You have have an opportunity to transform everything about the way we think about programming. This "big picture" talk starts with the Earth; it's losing mass at a rate of 1.5 grams per second due to the energy the Internet demands. This is in spite of the fact that programming languages fundamental to the modern Internet remain essentially the same as they were in the 1960's, says Robert Martin. Martin's energetic lecture questions the basic assumptions involved in software development.
Picnik's original operations staff person, Justin Huff, and second hire, Tim Wilfong tell the story of how the company removed a SPOF, a single point of failure, by hiring Tim. They list some good rules of thumb for this operational transition, and are frank about the flexibility, honesty and lack of ego needed by both people for this type of change to succeed. Picnik was acquired by Google just months after Tim's hire. This talk offers interesting anecdotes about managing rapid growth.
Metrics have to be state of the art to measure performance on SSDs, solid state drives. In this short yet technical talk, Dr. Bradley Kuszmaul from Tokutech and MIT discusses his own experiences. Comparing InnoDB to his own team's TokuDB he discusses why the fractal based model is faster at dealing with insertions. Going through the thought process involved in speeding up database design, Dr. Kuszmaul discusses using simplified models for speeding up the bandwidth of read/write processes.
MeshCentral, a remote monitoring and management web site, allows a user to connect with home or office devices from anywhere in the world. It requires a special management agent on computers, but once installed, the computers will show up in the My Devices section of the MeshCentral web site allowing a user to monitor them, power them on and off and take control of them. Developer Ylian Saint-Hilaire of Intel discusses the project, now in its alpha phase.
Website performance is second only to security in user expectations, claims Joshua Bixby, president of Strangeloop Networks. He suggests that web page rendering must be kept under two seconds to retain user loyalty. Website acceleration directly impacts a company's business metrics and KPIs. Bixby presents his team's latest findings about the relationship between web performance and business benefits.
To enable a free flow of data across platforms, operating systems and languages, Jean Paoli and his team, the Interoperability Strategy team at Microsoft, are working tirelessly. Paoli asks "What is an open cloud?" He contends that it's a cloud where data moves easily in and out, where programmers can work with the languages they choose. A truly open cloud will unleash the imaginations of developers to use the cloud's new data sets and computing power.
Musician and CD Baby founder Derek Sivers had already built his popular music selling website using his own cobbled-together PHP framework when he realized he needed to do something different. His quirky code was not able to scale as the site grew and Rails was the solution. In his 2010 Railsconf keynote, Sivers describes the journey he took and his own thought processes in deciding to use Rails as a framework for this award-winning project.
