Homo technologicus' asylum

I’ve talked at length about the importance of business process monitoring alongside of system monitoring, but in discussions I found that sometimes an overview and simple examples are not enough to convince people about the benefits of this approach. Business owners think they don’t need to know anything about the operational performance of their systems as long as they have their numbers, and engineers often don’t feel they need invest time into understanding the business they are supporting in detail, finding examples shown too “common sense.”
continue reading »

I recently was invited to join RSS Ray during his weekly radio program “Online Marketing with RSS Ray” broadcasted on WS Radio, to discuss the challenges in creating and operating business online. We covered a lot of great topics that would be relevant to anyone trying to either build or improve their web presence, starting from pointers on what to look for when selecting a vendor, to scalability and security considerations, and all the way to the tips on choosing the right CMS for your business. You can listen to the two-part podcast below.
continue reading »

Content Management Systems (CMS) have become one of the most powerful internet-related products. What once was a gadget for web developers and technology geeks is now a must-have tool for various business units. Because of the pace at which the world of internet technology changes, and the high demand for up-to-date content availability, there are thousands of products (commercial and open source alike) that offer a myriad of features to the companies in need of a solution to publish their content.

Unfortunately, over the past decade, the term “CMS” has become a buzz word, a commodity if you will. Everything web-related (short of social media, and that’s changing nowdays as well) has been rolled into those three characters. Originally (loosely) defined as “web application to create, edit, store and publish online content”, CMS has transformed into a much larger beast, covering e-commerce inventory management, SEO tool, workflow creator, and much much more. There are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of “How to choose CMS” articles out there, all composed from different perspectives, starting from a designer usability stand and ending with a CFO financial point of view. This article is not one of them. The goal here is to separate the term “CMS” into two very distinct components, and analyze the impact and/or the importance of each in a context of selecting a system to support your business.
continue reading »

I often get criticized for my mantra towards the development approach. Your code may be elegant, by mine f***ing works. In response, I hear statements ranging anywhere from “You don’t understand best practices” to “You hate testing!” In an effort to avoid repeating myself on regular basis, I decided to write down my point of view on the topic. Adhere to it or not – your choice.
continue reading »

At $work we specialize in performance audits on systems of every size, from start-up sites hacked together overnight, to a ginormous applications built by world-recognized brand companies. I’ve seen a lot of interesting (and sometimes very unique) performance issues in every level of the stack: code (front-end and back-end), architecture, databases, (sometimes all of the above), but there is one particular, very “Performance 101″, issue that I see all the time. And frankly – it bugs the hell out of me. In fact, the problem is so common sense that writing about it seems a little embarrassing, yet the frequency of seeing the same issue is proving otherwise.
continue reading »

“OMG, Facebook is DOWN!!!” was the cry of the millions when Facebook was unavailable for about 3 hours because of the network issues. Given the nature of Facebook service, the downtime did not have any long lasting effects on it’s user base. In fact, some say that the productivity significantly increased during the 3 hour window without access to Facebook. Bottom line is – the unavailability of the social networking service doesn’t negatively impact the users (ego and reputation of the service aside). Question is: does it also hold true for the companies leveraging Facebook, or other social networks like Twitter, Flickr, FourSquare, etc., in their daily operations?

continue reading »

I came across this problem when I decided to integrate Growl notification support for my Perl script. Instead of using a standard custom log() function, I wanted to override the print function to pipe the output to the media of my liking. Unfortunately, print is a reserved keyword in Perl which cannot be overridden. Fortunately, it’s Perl – so there is no such thing as impossible.
continue reading »

To start the year off right, I thought I’d talk about something fun for everyone. For quite some time now OmniTI and Clearleft have been working on Fontdeck, a web service delivering real fonts to your website. As we are fast-approaching open beta, I decided to talk a bit about the service, as well as to showcase some of the fonts. And just because I am in that kind of mood, the rest of the post will be modeled based on the late night infomercial that everyone love to hate. continue reading »