First things first. This is not meant to be a beef against developers. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the living room that is the divide between brilliant code writers and the risk averse operations team.It is almost by default that developers are disruptive with their creative... Stumbling onto 800-CEO-Read, and their top books feature, I found Brogan and Smith's work. Read more Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements
by Ronald Bradford
No Nonsense, Readable, Practical, and CompactI like that this book is small; 150 pages means you can carry it easily. It's also very no nonsense. It does not dig too deeply into theory unless it directly relates to your... Often when we think about speeding up and scaling, we focus on the application layer itself. We look at the webserver tier, and database tier, and optimize the... Recently at Surge 2011, the annual conference on scalability and performance, Google's CIO Ben Fried gave an illuminating keynote address. His main insight was that generalists are the people that will lead engineering teams in successfully scaling the web.In a world where the... Restaurant Scalability
Could pro-waitering serve up some lessons on web scalability? Observing peak hour dining at a New York restaurant gave us some insight.I was dining at a restaurant the other day... One of the great things about the Internet is how it has made it easier to put great ideas into practice. Whether the ideas are about improving people’s lives or a new way to sell and old-fashioned product, there’s nothing like a good little startup tale of creative disruption to deliver us... Scalability is about application, architecture and infrastructure design, and careful management of server components.
1. Object Relational MappersORMs are popular among developers but not among performance experts. Why is that? Primarily these two engineers experience a web application from entirely different perspectives. One is building functionality, delivering features, and results are measured on fitting business requirements. Performance and scalability are often low... 1. This page or area of the website is very slow, why?There are a lot of components that make up modern internet websites, and a lot of places to get stuck in the mud. Website performance starts with the... 1. Backup outside of the CloudSome of the high profile companies affected by Amazon's April 2011 outage...Top Articles
How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck
November 25, 2011
Book review – Trust Agents by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith
November 25, 2011
Book Review – Effective MySQL
November 3, 2011
5 Tips to Cache Websites and Boost Speed
November 1, 2011Why generalists are better at scaling the web
October 25, 2011
iHeavy Newsletter 84 – Restaurant Scalability
September 29, 2011
Scale Quickly Like Birchbox – Startup Scalability 101
September 18, 20115 Things That Are Toxic to Scalability
August 26, 2011
Top 3 Questions From Clients
August 15, 2011
5 Ways to Avoid EC2 Outages
August 1, 2011Stumbling onto 800-CEO-Read, and their top books feature, I found Brogan and Smith's work. Brogan's blog intrigued me enough so I walked down to the Strand here in NYC to pick up a copy.
What I found was an excellent introduction to the nebulous world of social media marketing, where you find all sorts of advice and suggestions on how to engage your target audience. If you're feeling like an ignoramus on matters of social media, Trust Agents is a great place to start and will give you ideas of how to 'humanize' your digital connections.
The authors illustrate the Trust Agent idea with Comcast Cares for example and how they engaged customers, and what worked so well for them. Or Gary Vaynerchuk and his game changing Wine Library TV about wine. He also emphasizes that building relationships online is a lot like building relationships in the real world a la Keith Ferrazzi of Never Eat Alone fame. Engage in meaningful ways with people, don't market to them. Share valuable tidbits, and the community will reward you tenfold.
A 'trust agent' lives by six principles:
- Make your own game - be willing to take risks and break from the crowd
- Be 'One of Us' - be part of the community by doing your bit and contributing to it
- The Archimedes Effect - leverage your own strengths wisely
- Agent Zero - position yourself at the center by connecting people and groups
- Human Artist - learn how to work with people; help others and be conscientious of etiquette
- Build an Army - you need allies to help spread your ideas
The book is excellent. Put it on your holiday list.
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN