Faster Web Pages Makes Users Happy
Steve Souders, the creator of YSlow and the author of the book High Performance Web Sites, is one of the most respected experts on website performance in the world. We here at Pingdom are big fans of his work, and decided to probe his mind about the excellent YSlow Firefox add-on for evaluating website performance (which he created while working at Yahoo), his work at Google, and his thoughts around the ever-important issues of website performance and optimization.

The need for speed: Making Basecamp faster
Analysis: We relied heavily on New Relic’s outstanding RPM performance management suite to give us insight about the parts of Basecamp that were accessed the most as well as those that were most in need of improvement.

Caching: We’ve begun using Memcached in a variety of spots. Caching can be tricky with dynamic apps like Basecamp since different people often see different things, but we’ve implemented it carefully where it could be used to its best advantage.

MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.

Hardware upgrades: We recently made some significant upgrades to our database servers. We went from servers with 2 x Dual Core 2GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 6×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives to servers with 2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives. We’ve also upgraded our load balancers and have new switches coming soon as well.

Quite an interesting concept for a blog, to form teams with distinct characteristics to contribute on the blog.  I love those team names and their characteristics : Akriti, Prakriti, Jagriti and Samskriti.

These days, every thing 2.0, but this blog and the web site uses version 0.1. 

While, We appreciate and value Individuals and their aspirations, we strongly believe in Teams. So we have decided to operate and contribute to SwarnaAndhra v0.1 project as Teams. Each team is set with a distinct focus, responsibility and character just like an Individual.

SwarnaAndhra Harivillu v0.1: Introducing SwarnaAndhra v0.1 Teams

Here is a snappy does of Startup Wisdom.

Excellent analysis on UI. After reading this article, I looked around in my car, what kind of UI the car designers created that made driving so fun and effortless. They definitely looked at pragmatics rather than naive or new user. Once the glamour is gone, the pragmatics is what keeps user sticky.

I can’t believe, there are 500-600 startups coming up every year in India?

Learning from “bad” UI
Following fashion and the status quo is easy. Thinking about your users’ lives and creating something practical is much harder.

The Future of the Startup Workforce : OnDemand Talent?
So according to one entity’s claim, there are 800 startups in Bangalore. I know that as part of tracking startups, we see an average of about 500 - 600 new startups coming up every year, and these are just in the Technology space, and product focused.

The early days: How 37signals built buzz out of the gate
When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work. From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention (eNormicom), experiments with new ways of selling our services (37express), ways to show off our design thinking (37Better Project), etc. Here are a few of the key non-client projects that enabled us to build up an audience before we launched Basecamp:

A demo of Photosynth, dazzling tech that may transform the way we look at digital images. Using photos scraped from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes with navigation.

Photosynth Technology Preview

About 40 hours of Video lectures straight from the Architects of notable Web2.0 experiences, absolutely free and ready to download.  Here are my favorites to learn Java script,  Lectures that you can’t miss.

The JavaScript Programming Language

 

Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford provides a comprehensive introduction to the JavaScript Programming Language in this four-part video:

• Part 1: 31 minutes | M4V download
• Part 2: 31 minutes | M4V download
• Part 3: 29 minutes | M4V download
• Part 4: 20 minutes | M4V download
• Download slides (zipped PowerPoint file)

Advanced JavaScript

Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford lectures on the nuances of the JavaScript programming language in this three-part video:

• Part 1: 31 minutes | M4V download
• Part 2: 25 minutes | M4V download
• Part 3: 11 minutes | M4V download
• Download slides (zipped PowerPoint file)

High-performance JavaScript: Why Everything You’ve Been Taught Is Wrong

 Yahoo! Video (Flash) or download.yahoo.com (M4V)

Joseph Smarr is the Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, Inc. explores the core lessons  learned in the development of their apps and the details of how they’ve leveraged maximum performance from the web browser

Advancing JavaScript with Libraries

57 minutes; source: Yahoo! Video (Flash) or download.yahoo.com (M4V, iPod/iPhone-compatible) : John Resig of Mozilla Corp., author of the popular JQuery JavaScript library, describes the role of libraries in the world of frontend engineering, the problems they solve, and the things we can learn from how developers use and think about libraries in their projects.

• Part One | Part Two

Maintainable JavaScript

42 minutes; source: Yahoo! Video (Flash) or download.yahoo.com (M4V, iPod/iPhone-compatible) : Nicholas Zakas is an engineer on the team that brings you My Yahoo!, one of the most popular personalized portals on the web. In this talk, Zakas focuses on some fundamental concepts in the world of frontend engineering with an eye toward making code more maintainable.

An Inconvenient API: The Theory of the DOM

Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford discusses the nexus between JavaScript and the browser, exploring the history of the BOM and DOM APIs and their impact on frontend engineering today. This presentation is archived in three parts:

• Part 1: 31 minutes | M4V download
• Part 2: 21 minutes | M4V download
• Part 3: 26 minutes | M4V download
• Download slides (zipped PowerPoint file)

JavaScript: The Good Stuff

40 minutes; source: Yahoo! Video (Flash) or download.yahoo.com (M4V, iPod/iPhone-compatible) Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford keynotes the 2007 Konfabulator Developer Day at Yahoo! on June 7, 2007. In this talk, he describes his own journey from skepticism about JavaScript to a deep appreciation for its power and elegance.

High Performance Web Sites: 14 Rules for Faster Pages

37 minutes; source: Yahoo! Video (Flash) or download.yahoo.com (M4V, iPod/iPhone-compatible): Steve Souders is Yahoo’s chief peformance guru and the author of High Performance Web Sites. For the past three years, Steve has led a team investigating the root causes of poor page performance and applying the lessons learned to Yahoo!’s high-traffic, media-rich properties.

Java script and JQuery

JavaScript is a misunderstood language. While it, seemingly, doesn’t contain the libraries or abstraction of Java or the terse flexibility … all » of Scheme, it offers serious advantages to skilled developers. Combining a functional style with prototypal inheritance JavaScript is arguably the most widely deployed language of either type. Considering that virtually every computer user has an interpreter capable of running it, JavaScript serves to be one of the best languages to learn

Best Practices in Java script Library Design

This talk explores all the techniques used to build a robust, reusable, cross-platform JavaScript Library. We’ll look at how to write a solid JavaScript API, show you how to use functional programming to create contained, concise, code, and delve deep into common cross browser issues that you’ll have to solve in order to have a successful library.
John Resig is a JavaScript Evangelist, working for the Mozilla Corporation, and the author of the book ‘Pro Javascript Techniques.’ He’s also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library and the co-designer of the FUEL JavaScript library (included in Firefox 3).