More Best Practices for Large-Scale Websites: Lessons from eBay

Watch this presentation from Randy Shoup, distinguished engineer at eBay.

He goes on talking about the lessons learned from his organization to scale a service.

He brings in 10 lessons:

• Partition Everything
• Asynchrony Everywhere
• Automate Everything
• Everything Fails
• Embrace Inconsistency
• Expect (R)evolution
• Dependencies Matter
• Respect Authority
• Never Enough Data
• Custom Infrastructure

Those are valuable lessons for any...

New Microsoft Services Single Sign-In UX

Microsoft is going to deploy a new simplified user experience to login in its different services.

You can opt-in to this new UX by going here.  You will have to opt-in every week though.

The Missing Windows 8 Instructional Video

Scott Hanselman has produced an high quality video on YouTube.

The video is a nice and comprehensive introduction to Windows 8 for everyone (i.e. not geek only).

My experience with Windows 8 is that once you’ve figured out a few things (e.g. how to activate contextual Search), you can start appreciating the product.  Before that, it just looks...

Web Socket Protocol

Web Socket is a new protocol, standardised in RFC 6455, attempting to bring the best features of HTTP & TCP together.  More specifically, it aims at being Connected & full-duplex (as TCP), allowing server to call-back clients and universal (as HTTP).

This wasn’t done without pain.  Web Socket has a non-trivial handshake process, done over HTTP, after which the...

Agile Trade-offs

It was very refreshing to read Paul Dolman-Darrall’s article about the trade-offs to adopt in an agile delivery model.

Agile is more than 10 years old but still have whimsical attributes of a brand new artefact.  I believe this isn’t unique to agile but tend to be the case for any delivery methodology.  It seems that however how...