Category Archives: Web Development

Sessions I find most intriguing

Drupal, Web Development

DrupalCon Los Angeles kicks off in a few days. I am lucky to have an opportunity to partake. I’ll be sprinting Sunday and Friday. The higher-ed summit should be great and I am humbly leading a few table discussions at that.

Here are sessions I find intriguing, the ones with an asterix are where I’ll most likely be.

Sunday

  • Sprints

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

2 Web Performance Books

RWD, Tools, Web Development

I recently read two books focused on website performance.

Designing for performance (weighing aesthetics and speed) by Lara Callender Hogan.

Responsible Responsive Design by Scott Jehl.

The first book is interesting and a very good primer for new developers or for folks that have never considered web performance based on design trade-offs. The second book was a very handy manual of sorts and was my favorite.

I would reccomend reading both if you haven’t had a chance. They should be available from your local library through inter-library loans.

 

Data and Goliath – Book Review

Techno-Epistemology, Web Development

Data and Goliath is the newest book by Bruce Schneier. I have been following Mr. Schneier ever since reading Neal Stepheson’s Cryptonomicon. I have subscribed to his newsletter and seen him speak. With that stated, his new book is very accessible to a wide audience, much more so than his last book Liars and Outliers. It is not a book on cryptography as Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, is either. It is uniquely positioned to open societies eyes and a short list of actions society as a whole needs to take to reign in corporations and governments to allow us to take back control of our privacy.

The book is broken into three parts and ties a lot of what was revealed by Edward Snowden and the NSA PRISM project into a nice package of what is happening now and what will continue to happen if we don’t stand up and take action. Snowden revelations are sprinkled throughout the book. If the outrage most of the world expressed didn’t make sense to you after hearing about what the NSA, GHCQ, and other government organizations have been doing this book should make it clear. He also makes it clear that not just governments need the data, but the business model of the web is personalized data as well. The Lightbeam plugin is mentioned in the book, it makes browsing the web an adventure again, seeing just who is tracking you every time you go to a website.

Again and again Mr. Schneier presses the reader into thinking this is all doom and gloom but then pulls us back to show how good things can come of data and tracking, if we are allowed to be the ones who choose what to share. He points out early on that Angry Birds tracks our location, not because it is used in the game, but because they can then sell that data to a broker, who will then resell it to a buyer. I was not aware that Europe had stronger laws already on the books than the US that help citizens protect their privacy.

You will be hard pressed to find a more concise book on a defining issue of our internet generation. There are 121 pages of notes in the back of the hard copy as well allowing you to dig deeper into each topic. Many of the suggestions are high level policy changes that need to be made and citizens can have a big impact on that. The jacket reviews would lead on to think that if they read the book and follow some steps they can hide all of their data, that is not going to happen. It is a good book and well worth a few afternoons of reading.

Go buy it our get it at your local library.

Photo of the book

The Phoenix Project – Book Review

Kanban, Web Development

The Phoenix Project

Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, & George Spafford

ISBN13: 978-0-9882625-9-1

The Phoenix Project is the latest book from the trio of authors Kim, Behr, and Spafford. Ardent students of IT may recognize them as the authors of the Visible Ops Handbook1. Their new book is a very entertaining story rather than a staid handbook. The Phoenix Project is a narrative on project management being reborn within a fictional company. Published recently the book delves into a fairly new area of Information Technology (IT) named Development Operations often referred to simply as DevOps. This marriage of operations and development improves operational efficiency and cross-functional collaboration between business units if done right.

In the book we follow Bill Palmer, a freshly minted Vice President of IT Operations, as he transforms a dysfunctional IT group into the key driver for the company. Bill is mentored throughout the book by Erik Reid, a guy who embraces the principles of Lean Manufacturing and how they apply to DevOps. The book is a very entertaining read with thoughtful commentary peppered throughout.

At the beginning the company is in a sharp decline. The IT unit in charge of launching the new product that will save the business, project Phoenix, is a wreck and the IT boss just got fired. Bill is asked to complete project Phoenix. He doesn’t quite know what he is getting into but he knows it is a mess. The project until this point has been managed in a waterfall project management style and the deliverables have been delayed until everything is complete. Immediately Bill sees this as a problem as no one really knows how complete Phoenix is, no testing has been done, and they have to launch in just a few weeks; on top of that normal operations must continue as well.

Through meetings cast in a sardonic light we are shown there are few processes in place and the ones that exist are not followed by anyone. By adopting agile software development practices the team slowly starts to turn the project around. Following a disastrous launch of Phoenix, a wake-up call resonates throughout the team. They start to give the processes an honest chance and again, the workflow improves and the subsequent releases are less challenging. However, the company is still tanking. Bill gets approval to speak with the heads of other divisions to determine what they need Phoenix to do now, rather than when it was first dreamt up. Gathering this data allows Bill to pivot, to borrow a term from the Lean Startup2. They reprioritized their backlog and started producing software that provided immediate value to those using it. I feel that is the key take-away from the book, identifying the business goal of the organization and then ensuring that the work is always striving to move the company towards that goal. The authors really drive the point home by having the company software security officer John shaken to his very core when his work is swept under the rug by auditors. After a hiatus from work he returns ready to make sure the security issues that are prioritized are ones that help the business achieve their goals, rather than stopping them from doing so as had been his previous modus operandi.

Eventually Bill helps transform the company from within. The CEO Steve Masters comes to realize the importance of IT in his company. At the beginning of the book IT was thought of as a necessary component to be dealt with, not the core asset that it is for any operation in any industry.

1The Visble Ops Handbook by Kim, Behr, and Spafford

2Lean Startup by Eric Ries

The book image is from IT Revolution Press: http://itrevolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/PPhardcover.png