Professional

The other night we had a security issue that came up at 3am. Our combined response toolkit included DNS changes, akamai CDN configuration, adserver updates, javascript, HTML, and lots of good old fashioned interpersonal communication and persuasion. In these days where I’m working with dedicated ‘Javascript’ engineers that don’t read Java and operations people focused on CDN configurations that don’t know the application innards the concept of specialization is a concern. ...

Recently at work people are discussing the merits of different cache servers. That brought back memories of my days as the R&D Product lead for a line of cache systems. The high point was participating in the two week “Cache Bake Off” hosted by NLANR (the team broke off and formed The Measurement Factory. This was great fun where engineering teams from major companies got together to have thier systems pounded in a no holds barred performance test. I was working for a hardware company that had thier sights firmly set of being the leading tier two vendor (Tier one was considered too competative to take exponential growth risks). I think my gear nailed it by achieving 80% of the performance of the leadning brand at 1/5 the price. (And you could cluster 2 for less then half the cost and have over 50% better performance - if you order now you can get fee overnight shipping). ...

The joys of home ownership pressing demands at work have stifled my personal innovation time. Sometime in the last millennium I used be enjoy writing exploratory projects and releasing libraries that others may find useful. Over the last few months I’ve been looking for inspiration for a project that would help me explore some ‘search’ related ideas that have been bouncing in my head. I came across a project idea that represents the perfect personal trifecta! ...

Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession. Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means. We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours. The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated profiling every build. Software engineers have to be good at identifying the bottleneck, and over the past few days I saw how the larger teams ability to react mattered much more then the codebase itself. ...

I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright” The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling. What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’. My biggest issue with Java web development is that not enough attention is paid to modern web basics. The very first thing that I noticed on the SpringSource website was the 15 year old style url. ...