Collected thoughts about software and site performance ...
Web performance matters. Responsive sites can make the online experience effective, even enjoyable. A slow site can be unusable. This site is about online performance, how to achieve and maintain it, its impact on user experience, and ultimately on site effectiveness.
Home | Entries about Life, The Universe, and Everything (8), in reverse date order:
If I Had A Hammer ...
If I had a hammer
I'd hammer in the morning
I'd hammer in the evening
All over this land
I'd hammer out danger
I'd hammer out a warning
I'd hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land
--Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, 1949 [Wikipedia]
In May 2007, after I wrote about Controlling What You Can't Measure, I had a conversation with Ben Simo (see the comments) about metrics and tools ...
Chris Loosley
in Software Engineering , Optimization and Tuning, Life, The Universe, and Everything
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Performance is Always Subjective
Where performance is concerned, you should never underestimate the importance of the customer's perception. Usability specialists know this, because they focus on quality metrics that cannot be measured except by asking (or observing) customers. But technical professionals, who focus on more concrete metrics, tend to ignore issues of user perception.
Yet no matter how much time we spend systematically and objectively designing, measuring, and tuning our products to make sure that they really do run fast enough, in the end customer satisfaction is always a very subjective matter.
Chris Loosley
in Optimization and Tuning, Blogs and Publications, Life, The Universe, and Everything
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Shopping in Slow Motion
Slow Motion Shopping?
I'm always on the lookout for interesting news about performance, so there isn't much that surprises me. But occasionally performance can mean something rather different from what I have in mind.
Last August, Ben Rushlo wrote about his recent experiences measuring some Online Retail sites, and the performance issues he uncovered. As summer approaches once more, most retailers are busy building and testing their 2007 holiday shopping sites.
Thinking about this, I was searching for articles about slow shopping performance. Among them I found this news item, which comes complete with video coverage. Slowness, it turns out, can be more fun that I ever imagined.
Chris Loosley
in Life, The Universe, and Everything, Slowness
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Joel Spolsky on Meetings
Joel Spolsky on Meetings
Wisdom at Work: 1
Don't try to write poetry in a committee meeting
Joel Spolsy is a software developer in New York City. Since 2000 he's been writing Joel on Software, a blog about software development, management, business, and the Internet. I don't visit every day, but whenever I return I find articles that keep me reading.
Chris Loosley
in Blogs and Publications, Book Reviews, Life, The Universe, and Everything, Wisdom at Work
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The Web, Baseball, and the Price of Gas
This is only tangentially related to the usual subjects I cover in this blog, but it certainly relates to the way I approach research and blogging. I am always doing research online, and during summer evenings and weekends that activity is often accompanied by the day's radio broadcast of the Oakland A's baseball game -- the best baseball team here in the San Francisco Bay Area, by any objective standard.
Chris Loosley
in Life, The Universe, and Everything
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Insights from Interop 2006
In my last post I promised that if I get any new insights worth sharing this week while I'm at Interop 2006, I'll write about them. Well, here's the first installment, which consists of just three items. I'm supposed to be at the Keynote booth on the show floor soon, so this will be short, because it's quite a hike to get there.
Chris Loosley
in Events, Life, The Universe, and Everything
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Deep Thoughts on Management
Since I am writing a series of posts about managing Rich Internet Applications, and working on a post about the difficulties of measuring them, I thought I should begin with the popular management aphorism that you can't manage what you can't measure. Well, was that ever a diversion! Everyone is familiar with this saying, but interestingly, despite a ton of digging on the Web, the precise origin of this saying remains obscure (at least, to me).
Chris Loosley
in Measuring Performance, Life, The Universe, and Everything, Management Wisdom
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Sharpening the Saw
If you've read The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey, then you may remember that the seventh habit is Sharpening the Saw. The idea is that you should always allocate some time for personal renewal.
Chris Loosley
in Life, The Universe, and Everything
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