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load test your drupal application scalability with apache jmeter
there are many things that you can do to improve your drupal application's scalability, some of which we discussed in the recent scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal...
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load test your drupal application scalability with apache jmeter: part two
i recently posted an introductory article on using jmeter to load test your drupal application. if you've read this article and are curious about how to build a more sophisticated test that mimics...
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lamp performance on the elastic compute cloud: benchmarking drupal on amazon ec2
amazon's elastic compute cloud, "ec2", provides a flexible and scalable hosting option for applications. while ec2 is not inherently suited for running application stacks with relational databases...
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backing up your xen domains
backups are boring, but we all know how important they are. backups can also be quite powerful when working with xen virtualization, since xen allows for convenient back-up and restore of entire...
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zicasso launches drupal-powered web2.0 travel site
three weeks ago, zicasso.com launched a drupal-powered free personalized online travel service that aims to connect travelers to a global network of quality, pre-screened travel companies. unlike many...
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lamp on amazon ec2 shaping up nicely
recently i posted some encouraging performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud. while the performance was encouraging, the suitability of this...
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a new jmeter book from packt
recently i posted a couple of introductory articles on jmeter, a great apache open-source tool that allows you to measure the performance and scalability of a wide variety of services, especially...
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amazon release their elastic block store, ebs
a while ago i posted some performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud. amazon have just released ebs, the final piece of technology that makes...
View Articlesmartly purge your old backup files on linux
if you backup your *nix box, eventually you'll get into the business of purging your old backup files to preserve disk space. a reasonable way to do this is to use the find command to identify old...
View Articlesan francisco nosql meetup
last week, i had the good fortune to attend the san francisco nosql meetup organized by johan oskarsson. the meetup discussed the limitations of traditional relational database technology at scale and...
View ArticleSaying Yes to NoSQL; Going Steady with Cassandra
The last six months have been exciting for Digg's engineering team. We're working on a soup-to-nuts rewrite. Not only are we rewriting all our application code, but we're also rolling out a new client...
View ArticleA Geometric Progression of Effectiveness - The Agility of Interruptions
André Maurois (1885-1967) wrote that "The effectiveness of work increases according to geometric progression if there are no interruptions." At Digg we struggle between the clear benefits of...
View ArticleDealing with the Data Deluge
I gave the keynote presentation at Under the Radar's"Commercializing the Cloud" conference, It's about NoSQL and picking distributed database technologies that might help you with the "deluge of data"...
View ArticleDigg and Drupal
We've recently started using Drupal 6 at Digg.com for all our content needs. So far so good. Everything from our jobs page, to our site tour, to the Open Source site we launched three days ago, is...
View ArticleDigg Technical Talks
We recently started inviting external speakers to talk at Digg HQ on a variety of Technical subjects. Jack Dorsey the founder of Twitter and Square stopped to talk about the growth of Twitter and the...
View ArticleContinuous Deployment at Digg.com
Digg's Andrew Bayer has just written a blog describing how we use Git, Hudson, Selenium, Puppet and Gerrit to manage continuous deployment at Digg.Andrew describes how we get developer commits to...
View ArticleMore Digg Technical Talks
We had another couple of great external speakers talking at Digg HQ. The open-source master Doug Cutting stopped by the Digg office to talk about the growth of the Hadoop platform. He talks in detail...
View ArticlePurge Your Bug Database
Most companies with a shared refrigerator have a strict policy designed by a cunning admin to keep the fridge useful. A common approach is as follows: Each week: Ask employees to claim their items in...
View ArticleGilt's 5@5
Few people would argue the importance of great communication across a development organization. It’s vital that developers are aware of the work of their peers, not only the “what”, but also the “how”...
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Managers, stay out of the way!
Successful managers learn how to stay out of the way and let their teams work effectively and independently. Staying out the way doesn’t mean putting your feet up on your desk and playing Angry Birds...
View ArticleREWORK your Hiring Practices
REWORK, the latest book to emerge from the 37Signals.com, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, delivers some strong opinions on hiring. I loved the book (and the attack ad below promoting it). I...
View ArticleTechnical Phone Interviews
I spend a lot of my time hiring. Recently I’ve streamlined my technical phone screening. I’ve defined a “Technical Bar” that focuses on seven skill areas. Read more on my technical phone interviews blog
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Building Great Tech Teams: 12 Critical Questions
I recently had the pleasure of talking at First Capital's CTO summit. I hosted an interactive discussion on team building for around 100 CTOs and VPEs of small to medium sized, venture backed...
View ArticleHiring Great Drupal Developers - Buyer Beware!
Hiring Drupal developers is difficult. Hiring great Drupal developers in the current market often feels close to impossible. They are highly sought after and most of the people on the market, in all...
View ArticleThe Hungry Academy - An Innovative Way to Hire Developers
It’s always hard to hire great developers. If you want to hire them in volume you need to think outside the box. It looks like the team at LivingSocial and JumpStartLab have done just that with their...
View ArticleManagers! Become the Flywheel.
Arguably, the job of an engineering manager is to hire and sculpt a development team that is not only highly productive, but also precisely resourced for immediate business priorities.Easier said than...
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Leadership
Is great leadership the key to an organization's long term success?Check out Jeffrey Cohn's great piece on the subject, where he discusses the need for integrity, passion, courage, vision, judgement,...
View ArticleA look at Google’s Peer-to-Peer Bonus System
Google are associated with innovation in every aspect their business. Their management techniques are no exception. Google employ multiple award systems to motivate employees and perhaps the most...
View ArticleEmployee of the Month Award - Good or Bad?
The employee of the month award is pervasive in our corporate culture. Websites offer Step-by-step guides and will sell you blank merit certificates by the hundred. But is it a good idea?The system...
View ArticleScaling Agile at Gilt
Spotify recently documented their progressive approach to scaling Agile development with a fairly large team. Gilt’s approach has many similarities, but since some Spotify best practices are Gilt...
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