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Dear developers of RIAs and internet services.
Please consider the impact on users and other apps when attempting to send/receive packets. As more and more apps require communication with the cloud, we have a responsibility to prioritize the user’s experience over the need to get info fast.
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When I was a summer research student, I worked across the hall from the gait lab. They did cool stuff like motion capture and telemetry to measure the bio mechanical response to things like subjecting people to an unexpected drop. At the time they were working on a project for a major running shoe manufacturer who had a new cushioning technology. The problem they were working on was quantifying the ‘right’ amount of change.
Too much change in a shoe design and buyers, runners who replace their shoes at least once a year, won’t buy. Too little change and their competitors surpass them and buyers won’t feel the ‘improvements’. It’s a tough call.
The same is true in software. Even if your technology is superior, it has to feel ‘right’. Yep there’s a lot of subjectives in this post – that’s why software design is a hard problem.
With 25+ years of personal computing behind us, people have established conventions and expectations of the user experience. Stay away from those conventions and expectations and you risk users staying away from your application.
I love SimpleDB, no really I friggin’ love it but old habits die hard and sometimes I don’t use it the way I should. Or maybe I’m just not patient enough <cough>. Probably both.
Currently at ParkVu we’re using SimpleDB to store some info — shocking I know. The problem is that this info is somewhat event based. Ok that’s not the problem. The real problem is that sometimes I can query shortly after writing (putting) to SimpleDB and find results and sometimes I can find nothing but try again and find the information I was expecting. Presto: eventual consistency rearing the ugly side of it’s head and biting me firmly on the ass.
Fortunately there’s such beasts as Memcached to insulate you the developer from query/caching heroics. Eventual consistency, gotta love it but gotta consider it when working in the cloud.
Terry Goertz and I posted another AWS article this week.
We frequently get asked if Amazon Web Services are here for the long haul. Some companies worry about committing and investing in AWS if Amazon itself isn’t doing the same.
We also touch on the differences between Amazon’s, Google and Microsoft’s cloud computing offerings. Full article over at Red Canary.
There are still seats available for ExperienceTech!2008 hosted by MaRS & IDC. I’m doing a panel moderated by Stuart MacDonald of Expedia.ca and now TripHarbor fame, Leila Boujnane of Idee and the venerable David Crow.
We did a little pre-conf/pre-panel meeting Friday evening. Stuart, Leila and David were all gathered at MaRS and I phoned in while I chased my son on his bike around our neighbourhood until my BlackBerry ran out of juice and forced me to be confined to our porch. In any case, if our conversation is any indicator of our panel, I think you won’t want to miss it. We’re going pretty much unscripted and hope to rely on the audience to drive the conversation with Stuart playing ring master keeping Leila, David and myself in line.
Even if we suck, there’s lots of other interesting speakers at ExperienceTech. Grover Righter is sharing tips on growing and exiting with less capital. Grover is rumoured to be a kick-ass speaker and a general force to be reckoned with . Tom Kelley of IDEO is talking about innovation and there are even other panels if you dare risk missing ours.
Like I said, not too late to register.
Red Canary just posted the latest Amazon Web Services article by Terry Goertz and myself. In Surviving the Storm we dive into some of the operational and architectural considerations associated with running your solution on AWS and EC2 in particular. This is a follow-up to our first article Scaling with Clouds where we introduced the major components of AWS.
If you have topics you’d like us to cover please leave us feedback here or at Red Canary.
Jeff Barr gave the RedCanary article Terry and I wrote on Cloud Computing some nice coverage on the Amazon Web Services blog. Much appreciated.
So I guess we’re committed to writing at least 3 more.
Terry Goertz and I are writing a series of articles on designing, hosting and managing your application using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our first one, which provides a basic overview of AWS, is up on RedCanary.
We needed a portrait for RedCanary and not really being into the glamour shot scene, my son and daughter pulled together this drawing of the two of us. Yeah I’m convinced my kids have a pretty demented view of what we actually do. They know we do something with whiteboards. My daughter demanded help drawing UML actors and then my son proceeded to draw the hair and Terry’s beard. Finally it’s clear who the evil one is.
Ah yes forgot that artistes don’t appreciate small format screen experience. “I work on the big screen dammit…”
First reaction… OMG David Lynch has gotten old. Second reaction… spit take. I’m shocked he didn’t mention 1080p, oh wait that’s me.
If this is your perception of Agile…
And if you’re in the Waterloo, Ontario area, you might want to come out to a Communitech Event on Dec 17.
Are your software projects:
Defect free? Yes ? No
On-time? Yes ? No
Under budget? Yes ? No
Thrilling your users? Yes ? NoIf you answered Yes to all the above questions then congratulations, read no further. If you answered No to one or more then read on.
Since Agile was first introduced in 2001 it has taken the industry by storm. Recent surveys in Dr. Dobb’s Journal (www.ddj.com) have shown that Agile approaches are being adopted in 69% of organizations in North America and that Agile enjoys a significantly higher success rate than traditional projects. In this presentation Scott Ambler will describe what Agile is, address some of the myths that you may have heard, and discuss how Agile will affect your approach to software development. He’ll go beyond the Agile rhetoric surrounding programming and describe how project management, database development, documentation, modeling, user experience, and quality assurance activities are addressed by Agile teams.
Please join us for a complimentary afternoon seminar with Scott Ambler. Scott W. Ambler is the Practice Leader Agile Development at IBM Corporation. Scott is an award-winning author of several books, including books focused on the Unified Process, agile software development, the Unified Modeling language, and CMM-based development. Scott is a regular speaker at international IT conferences and is a contributing editor with Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Scott led the development of several software processes, including Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Enterprise Unified Process (EUP), and Agile Unified Process (AUP) methodologies.This seminar is produced by eLead.Inc in collaboration with Communitech
You can register here. For free (as in beer)!
The Agile series was pulled together by local Agile mavens Declan Whelan of DP Whelan and Associates and Jeff Berardine of Innosphere with support from Communitech. I helped a bit but not nearly enough — sorry guys!
If you’re practicing Agile and love it, or if you’ve tried an Agile method and hated it, or if you’re just Agile curious please come out and join in the discussion. Heck just come out and hear Scott Ambler.
