30 May 2008
(again you should read the slides)
- choosing the right name will make the dev think about this model and give it the right property
- Jim keeps saying we’re skipping layers
- using story cards
- jammed up over reoccurring events
- objects = data + behavior, so you can’t just talk about the data (rows/tables), you must look at behavior
- pull out the Class, Responsibilities, and Collaborator cards
- card only useful for organizing your thoughts not need to fill them all out
- “temporal expressions”
- CJ Date: apparently wrote a lot about data modeling
- Code Smell in Refactoring by Chad Fowler
- WoW: you see all kinds of human behaviors: Mafia, Philantropis
- Building games on Facebook
- He’s the author of Warbook: Rise of the Infernals
- w/i a week he had to fix stuff
- w/i 3 weeks had to rewrite
- started with firebug’s net tab
- look at your logs: pl_analyze
- iostat
- you need tools, but you also need strategies
- don’t need it? ditch it.
- slowing it down? simplify it.
- logging it? stop
- selecting it? cache it.
- memcache
- put sessions in cache
- no-select design
- use memcache
- cache_fu already does this
- using ec2
- 1 db box
- 1 memcache box
- 1 static file
- X mongrel boxes
- The Hard Part
- Scale Everything Else
- Scale your deploymnet
- Scaling your support
- community management
- give them updates every day
- server cost $2000 a month
- you need money
- warbook makes $100,000/month
- 1.5 million users
- 16 million page views
Q&A
- remove transactional saves
- save per fields
- how to solve the persistence problem on ec2? db not on amazon
- which facebook lib? started with rfacebook, facebooker, bebo
Slides
#railsconf2008
30 May 2008
- Successful biz fills a need
- What do you need
- paper work important, expressing the idea idea is better, being flexable on that idea
- energy
- so much you have to do before hand, why are you doing this?
- set goals – we need to do x by y, if we don’t get there we’ll change things
- have a path to cash
- have an exit strategy
- why create a company
- Liability – legal protection from your bugs :)
- Taxes – more buying power, talk to an accountant
- working with other companies
- easy of working with other companies
- Ownership – knowing who gets what
- perception of credibility – but don’t try to be what you are not (cd of office noises for phone calls)
- types of business
- Fictitious Name
- LLC is a good idea
- You don’t have to do this in Delaware
- hire lawyer/accountant
- your website should be very clear about what you wanted
- we build things we need, but if you look at say moms with kids at home you have a much bigger audience
- marketing. peepcode logo (myers: I’ve always thought it looked like a lingerie ad)
- you will spend 40% or more of you time marketing
- making it work is the hard part not the (unknown) paper work
- hard part: adjusting the the lack of stability
- common to be in a feast or famine situation
- co-working is a way to get an office with others
- creativity zone
- biz deals goes like this
- NDA – worth it for a 10k deal to have your lawyer look at it
- proposal – 40 pages shortest he ever did
- contract – you should write the contract, here’s what I’ll do, he’s what I’m liabile and not liabile for
- Functionality Outline – evolution of a statement of work
- getting the money – net 30, net 60, net 15, net 0 – put it in your contract, also “there is a 2% fee for late payments”
- products: it’s about liability
- TOS/privacy policy – be clear, be up front
- ways to get money (see slides)
- on hivelogic he’ll post a sample SOW
- biggest website at&t runs
- all rails
- 1 year ago 1/2 as big
- (long slides)
- why a big rewrite? – it’s a great bundler
- no automated tests, new features really hard
- lots of code being replace with site redesign
- hard to leverage
- java: get around this web thing with design patterns so you get to the real business of talking to middleware
- devs except that not everything they want will get done
- core team never more that 4 – trying to keep it small
- they looked at django and ejb3/jboss
- no to django
- better automated testing integration (hear hear)
- more platform maturity
- clearer path to C if necessary for performance (I don’t agree with that. Python + C is easy, plus you have psyco and ctype that let you get C performance or use c libs with pure python)
- developer comfort and experience
- not convinced anyone needs MOM
- only one developer that knew rails at the start
- project got stuck
- project lead appointed to make decision-making and communication with executive team, or at least the appearance
- sometimes she decided in private with her bosses
- freeze current site
- if it’s not simple to decide how to change a current site behavior, don’t change it. save it for a later phase.
(it’s worth it to read the slides, even for a non rewrite project. The slides are probably have too much on them, but that’s good for you)
- they spent an amazing amount of time communicating what was changing.
- F5 Load Balancers
- switched to erubis in web tier
#railsconf2008
30 May 2008
(notes from mostly Randy and a little from me)
Chad Fowler
- Reflecting on the history of Ruby/Rails conferences of old
- Lost Last Ep. apparently glitched last night, thus everyone downloading Lost
DHH
- actually saying something nice about Joel
- used to take Joel’s columns to meetings to say “this is what we should be doing”
- slide of Angelina Jolie… the only slide… trying to get a higher evaluation score
- now showing a Brad Pitt picture… so he’s not a male chauvinist pig
- slide of ian somerhalder… another good looking guy, but brad beats him in a google fight
- he lies about the number slides
- brad is ipod, ian is a zune
- blue chip vs off brand
- blue chip chair is herman miller… lots of knockoffs… like the ones we have at work…
- Angelina is blue chip… Uma Thurman is off brand
- Brad is blue chip… Iam is off brand
- Great software
- makes people happy
- obsesses over aesthetics
- observes the culture code
- Joel does lolcats
- goes through a scenario about how it sucks to install updates on windows…
- the ui sucks
- the progress bars are misleading
- the system now doesn’t recognize one of your devices.
- You can’t unplug the device. Tell us First. Fuckhead.
- this experience sucks… makes people unhappy
- Learned helplessness is a book about how lack-of-control makes people unhappy
- just do something that makes you feel in control
- Abercrombie & Fitch checkout example
- doesn’t give you a choice over how you checkout… it is a 4 stage process, and you have to do it in their order
- you can change your information, you can do whatever you want in any order… you are in control
- Tips for making people happy
- Put the user in control
- Positive feedback
- Tips for obsessing over aesthetics
- iphone is way more popular than samsung blackjack
- but iphone is slower, has a smudge screen rather than a keyboard, doesn’t have exchange compatibility,
- but the iphone is beautiful… “if you accidentally swallowed it, it would go right down”
- in paris, they don’t have fire escapes, because they are ugly… it’s more important to look good than to survive a fire
- it works… people prefer something that looks good over something that is better
- Tips for observing the culture code
- the ford explorer has 88 deaths per year
- the toyota camry has 41 deaths per year… it’s not safer to be in an SUV, actually… even though people THINK they feel safer
- SUVs have soft corners, airbags everywhere, cupholders, and are up high. they trick us into feeling better and safer.
- web 2.0 don’t have visions, they go to parties
- Misattribution: when you have coffee, you enjoy the movie more… it’s not the movie, it’s the coffee!
- ends the talk playing “Sweet Home Alabama”... that was a good talk!
(it was interesting, because he didn’t have a final point. At the end he compared some blog posts that DHH and _why wrote about ruby and it had all these good words (passion, love, ...). He swapped them to their antonym and labeled it Java. I expected him to follow with telling us that there was a common misattribution with rails and these feelings and that we could find the same else where)
#railsconf2008
30 Nov 2007
I had this crazy idea back at the beginning of 2001. I wrote it down in a text file one morning and forgot most of it.
Musical Theme:
The music from “the Magician’s Appretiace” from Fantasia
Characters:
- apache – hard working httpd daemon, works at a Penguin booth (on linux). Maybe an indian with an apache feather in his hat?
- mysql – apache’s coworker, hands him the information that he hands to the user. Hands him a bucket of info, apache then gives it to the user.
- slashdot.org – you remember when the brooms became a thousand fold in “the Magician’s Appretiace”? * user (or rather the users packets) – come to apache to get info. (stick figures with buckets?)
Events:
We show the webmaster working at his computer (rl). click on his computer his packets are then shown handing info (buckets) to apache, who passes it on to mysql, who pours in to the feeding pool that then starts to drip down to the bucket pool. Then the webmaster at his computer nods off and goes to sleep….
you see a rack behind them… the lights that we can see on the rack go along with the tempo… back to virtual world… a users packets come buy every so often (with music and gets data), apache and mysql work on it and do it with great flourish. They start to get board waiting for users to come…. so the write something down and put it in a bucket and it turns to another color water. both the daemons pore the bucket into their feeding pool and the water turns that color.
the first user who comes along looks at the water when he gets it and drinks…. and is shocked, he starts carrying it to another booth (website) and the daemon there takes the bucket and emptys it into another pool…. (rw: you see rusty or someone look at the their screen and their jaw drops open). The other apache server gets an order and pours the water into their feeding pool… all of sudden all the users coming by start walking to our booth.
the daemons see the users coming and congratulate each other…. the happly fill the users buckets. and see more coming.
one of the users packets go to /. where the fill buckets at ten and a time with jetsprays, and soon as they have the info all the users start coming towards our two daemons.
eventually the webmaster is awoken by the rack lights which are going crazy … sees his bandwidth going thru the roof…. he makes the users stop some how.
#ideas
30 Nov 2007
In Space Radio: More Static, Less Talk we learn how hard it would be to detect alien signals. Also about an formula to figure out how many intelligent lifeforms their might be in our galaxy.