As the underlying tech becomes a commodity, design emerges as the answer. The technology industry is undergoing a creative transformation. A large amount of value is shifting from the development of underlying technologies — the infrastructure, the platforms, the chips, the radios, the hardware — to the design of how technology interacts with the user. This tectonic creative shift will determine many of tomorrow’s tech winners and losers.
The trend has been emerging for a couple years now, although user interaction has always an important part of tech. But there are some major driving forces behind this trend, and why it’s emerging now. We, at GigaOM, think experience design is so important this year that we’re focusing our two-day annual RoadMap conference (which will take place in San Francisco in a couple weeks) on the topic. The value of the internet is now moving to the valuable and emotional experiences that people get from using it and interacting with it. Some tech companies can see this creative and design-centric writing on the wall. How Facebook Ships Code « FrameThink. I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates. It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried).
These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software. Seems like others are also interested in Facebook… The company’s developer-driven culture is coming under greater public scrutiny and other companies are grappling with if/how to implement developer-driven culture.
The company is pretty secretive about its internal processes, though. HUGE thanks to the many folks who helped put together this view inside of Facebook. Notes: as of June 2010, the company has nearly 2000 employees, up from roughly 1100 employees 10 months ago. It’ll be super interesting to see how Facebook’s development culture evolves over time — and especially to see if the culture can continue scaling as the company grows into the thousands-of-employees. What do you think? Like this: The Decline and Fall of Agile. It's odd to talk about the decline and fall of the agile movement, especially now that it's so popular, but I actually think the agile movement has been in decline for several years now.
The State of the Art I've seen a shift in my business over the last few years. In the beginning, people would call me to help them introduce Agile, and I would sell them a complete package that included agile planning, cross-functional teams, and agile engineering practices. Now many people who call me already have Agile in place (they say), but they're struggling. They're having trouble meeting their iteration commitments, they're experiencing a lot of technical debt, and testing takes too long. So they hire me to help them with one of these things. When I go visit, I see a team that is nominally agile, but is suffering huge numbers of problems and is anything but the joyful, settled, smooth-running workplace I expect from an agile organization. The Role of Scrum Scrum, Misapplied You're Doing It Wrong. Features that slow a website down...
Today representatives of Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing teams, Jake Brutlag and Eric Schurman respectively, presented the results of user performance tests at today’s Velocity Conference. The talk was entitled The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. These are long-term tests were designed to see what aspects of performance are most important. To know how to improve their sites both Bing and Google need to know what tweaks to page load perceptions and realities help or hurt the user experience. This is one of the first performance tests that has actual data (and is not strictly anecdotal). Here are Brutlag’s and Schurman’s final points: “Speed matters” is not just lip serviceDelays under half a second impact business metricsThe cost of delay increases over time and persistsUse progressive renderingNumber of bytes in response is less important than what they are and when they are sent Server-side Delays Test: The test results:
... aren't feature at all. Today representatives of Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing teams, Jake Brutlag and Eric Schurman respectively, presented the results of user performance tests at today’s Velocity Conference. The talk was entitled The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. These are long-term tests were designed to see what aspects of performance are most important. To know how to improve their sites both Bing and Google need to know what tweaks to page load perceptions and realities help or hurt the user experience. This is one of the first performance tests that has actual data (and is not strictly anecdotal). The numbers may seem small, but they if you are dealing in millions/billions they add up quickly. Here are Brutlag’s and Schurman’s final points: Server-side Delays Test: Server-side delays that slow down page delivery can significantly and (more importantly) permanently affect usage by users with the test.
Progressive Rendering. Software Architecture Visualizations : un album. Asshole driven development. Some say it’s immaturity: that software is still a young industry and all the change is the path to some true fundamentals. Others say it’s because software people like making things up and can’t help themselves. Well I say this: if we’re going to have dozens of models we may as well have some that are honest, however cynical, to what’s really going on much of the time. (There is a happy list of these I’m sure, but this is the cynical one). Asshole Driven development (ADD) – Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) – The driving force behind most individual efforts is to make sure than when the shit hits the fan, they are not to blame.
I’m sure you’ve seen other unspoken methods at work – what are they? Please add to the over 200 reader suggested methods in the comments. It's not a promise, it's a guess. “When is it going to be done?” Is a reasonable question and we as software developers should try to come up with the best answer we can based on our experience and analysis. What we should not do, however, is treat our answer as solemn oath. When you treat estimates as promises instead of guesses, you bind your worth as a worker to it. If you do not meet your own deadline, you are a failure. And since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with scanty or no tests.
Rushing to meet your estimate promise once or twice might be bearable, but it’s ultimately unsustainable. If you treat the estimate as a “best guess based on the limited information available to me before I start the work”, though, you’ll change the frame and break the cycle of deadline anguish. That’s the true value of estimates.
'Drastic' Digg overhaul could 'shock' users, says Kevin Rose - T. Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineerin. Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering Robert L. Glass This month's column is simply a collection of what I consider to be facts—truths, if you will—about software engineering. I'm presenting this software engineering laundry list because far too many people who call themselves software engineers, or computer scientists, or programmers, or whatever nom du jour you prefer, either aren't familiar with these facts or have forgotten them.
I don't expect you to agree with all these facts; some of them might even upset you. Great! Complexity C1. People P1. P2. Tools and techniques T1. T2. T3. Quality Q1. Q2. Q3. Q4. Reliability RE1. RE2. RE3. RE4. RE5. RE6. Efficiency EF1. EF2. EF3. Maintenance M1. M2. M3. M4. M5. Requirements and design RD1. RD2. RD3. RD4. Reviews and inspections RI1. RI2. RI3. RI4. Reuse REU1. REU2. REU3. REU4. REU5. Estimation ES1. ES2. ES3. ES4. ES5. ES6. ES7. Research RES1. There, that's my two cents' worth of software engineering fundamental facts. Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comm. Only a month after rival comment system JS-Kit launched Echo, a real-time comment system, Disqus is striking back with its biggest upgrade since the service launched. Along with a revamped comment system, Disqus 3.0 is also what CEO Daniel Ha calls a “conceptual reconstruction” for the service: Disqus will now be split into two separate but complimentary products, called Comments and Profiles, in recognition of the way two distinct sets of users have been using the commenting engine.
For those who just got worried about losing the Disqus they know and love, fear not: the service isn’t changing all that much. The Comments product has been revamped, but it’s still the commenting engine that bloggers can embed using a few lines of Javascript (we’ve embedded the new comment system below this post if you’d like to try it out for yourself). Profiles isn’t yet another social network you have to maintain. In terms of actually commenting, the new system has a lot in common with Echo. Chrome_Release_Cycle.