Dealing with a Vampire Launch: What to do when your site bursts into flames

We're gonna need a montage.

I've written about Vampire Launches in the past. For new comers, a 'Vampire Launch' is when a site or application is launched and has a brief and glorious moment in the sun but then suddenly and horrifically erupts into flames. Vampire launches do happen and when they do, an expert firefighting team needs to be deployed to deal with technically complex and mysterious issues in a pressured and emotional environment. Having been involved in a few crises in my time and watching and participating in their resolution, these are some things I've learnt along the way.

Effective Resource Management in Web Application Development

Mmmm. Chocolate.

My wife and I recently found ourselves in a frustrating predicament. Over a year ago we made a decision that we needed to move house and therefore needed to save money so we could afford a deposit. We started our saving initiative my way. I created an elaborate spreadsheet which listed our outgoings in meticulous detail. Well, the outgoings that I knew about like bills and mortgage payments. I then added in lines on our living expenses and luxuries. I was very generous about how much we needed to live and how much we could splash out on for fun. I crunched some numbers and the end result looked pretty good. We could save a tidy sum every month and be living in a new house before you could say ‘white picket fence’.

Social networks: If you build it, will they come?

Don't do what Costner did or you will fail.

Social is pretty big now, right? If you ask me what main things the next generation have which I didn't have growing up, I'd say Facebook, Twitter and Apps. It's no surprise then that businesses are desperate to get involved and use social networking to boost their profile and their profits. And while they're at it they will create a couple of apps too.

There are many different strategies to leverage social media. Some companies try to use what's already there. They will litter their web site with Social calls to action. Do you 'Like' this page about the latest innovation in washing powder? Of course I do! Which person of sound mind wouldn’t? Would you like to tweet and then re-tweet this great deal on life insurance? Did you have to ask? #Death is trending right now.

Building a Cloud Platform: Weapons of War

I've just returned home from a big development build. For the last five months we've been in a secret room racing to get version 1.0 of a cumulonimbus size cloud project out. It wasn't easy. Getting to 1.0 was a real battle because... well, you don't know! Because you weren't there... man!

Now that I am back on civilian soil and fighting off night terrors from the horrors of war, I can reflect on what went well and what when badly. This could be a book in its own right; but for this post I'm going to cover The Weapons of War - or the essential tools needed when building any product or platoon... I mean platform.

Web application development is transforming, but that doesn't mean everything has to change

The way we build web and mobile device applications is changing fundamentally. What this change is - in a nutshell - is application code moving from the server to the client. The server being big computers sitting in a data centre somewhere and the client being a modern day browser. To explain this further, let’s call the old way of building web sites as web 2.0 and the new way as web 3.0.

In the past, when web 2.0 was all the rage, web sites were built with a lot of server side code written languages such as c#, php or java. This code ran on various web server application platforms such as Microsoft ASP.Net. The code ran on the server and spat out HTML which was rendered on a browser and allowed the user to interact with the application. There was probably was a bit of JavaScript but none of which was essential to the application doing what it needed to do.

What defines a successful project?

Single Fist Pump!

A colleague asked me over coffee, “What do you do?” I sipped my full fat cappuccino and reflected on the question. Sipping coffee and reflecting go well together so I may have milked the situation a bit more than was required. 

“Hello!” he interrupted. “Did you hear me?”

It was a good question erring on the side of existential and difficult to sum up in a tweet sized thought bite. 

For a bit of context, I have a technical leadership role which can mean many things to many people - including other people in technical leadership roles. I had to dig deep and try find an answer that came from my heart and wasn’t ripped off from the Steve Jobs Autobiography. 

“To make sure we deliver projects... successfully.” I said with the thousand yard stare of a visionary. 

“To deliver projects?” he smirked. “Truly inspirational.”

[definition] Pushing Tin

Pushing Tin [pa oosh ing tihn]
Adjective
1. Setting up and managing technical infrastructure in the days before CLOUD architecture
2. A movie with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton in which Billy Bob gets really, really lucky.

Avoiding the pitfalls of joint Web Site and Web Service development

How to turn a Balrog into a puppy dog.

Developing web and device applications these days is more often than not dependant on 3rd party web services. This integration is one of the biggest culprits behind projects being delivered late and costing more than expected. I’m not talking about fully developed and functioning web services, of course; but web services developed in tandem with the web site. There are a number of reasons why developing web sites and dependant web services together can cause severe delays in and over-spends in project.

RavenDB Vs SQL - A follow up

The fight they were all waiting for

This is a following on post from RavenDB is it all it’s cracked up to be. A few have commented that to provide any meaningful interpretation of the load test they needed to know more about the SQL implementation which is fair enough. So, here we go.

Is RavenDB all it's cracked up to be?

It all started with a Vampire Launch.

As a seasoned technologist I’m always happy to bare old battle scars and discuss them candidly with my peers and starry eyed groupies* over a few pints down the local. Technology, after all, always has problems and we have taken it upon ourselves to carry that giant boulder up the hill and start afresh when it rolls back down again.

Take, for example, a recent run in with a search implementation on a property website. We selected a search technology built on Lucene.Net - a high performance, enterprise search platform that is fast becoming an industry standard.  Choosing a Lucene based search provider for a web site heavily reliant on search functionality seemed like a great idea at the time. Fast forward to go live and we soon discovered that the search didn’t hold up very well under significant load. This is what I call a “Vampire Launch” i.e. a web site having a brief moment in the sun but then suddenly erupting into flames. One stressful week later and the search was back online and taking the strain of public exposure. This time however, it was now driven by trusty Microsoft SQL.

Before I cover up this grizzled scar (until the next showing that is), it's worth highlighting three important lessons harvested along the way.

Lesson 1: If you are trying out a new technology make sure your POC includes load testing.

Lesson 2: If you are using a new technology make sure the providers of the technology are able to support it.

Lesson 3:  Make sure you build using interfaces and abstraction in case you ever need to swap out a nasty search implementation.

So how does this all relate to RavenDB?

Out of the Search Darkness

"A harrowing tale of one man facing his search daemons"  Sergey Brin

9 out of 10 technical projects which fail is because of badly thought out and executed search. Okay, that number is a piece of fiction; but, my hopefully empathetic friend, that is how I feel; because yet again I am fighting the same old user experience battles when it comes to designing search.

I think the root cause of search atrocities is, like most heinous and tyrannical acts, due to ignorance combined with wild ambition. Let's stuff everything cool we've ever seen on any site that I've ever dun a search on and then it should be wickid, yeah? No. What about fuzzy.. No. What about nice mix of facetted did you means? No. What abou... No. No. No.

Now, before I cast myself in a dubious light of technological pessimism and creativity bashing egotism, let me take you down the river on a journey of exploration and discovery into tech rash's top dos and donts when designing and building search.

Why vendor favouritism is a good thing

As a technology solutions provider I often come across clients who are against vendor favouritism - especially when it comes to Content Management Systems. In this camp, technology favouritism is seen as being biased at the expense of customers' commercial and operational needs.My view is that when it comes to building and delivering complex technology projects, vendor favouritism is essential.

And, dear potential customer, this is why:

LA Noire: Not as good as Kings Quest 1

The adventure game was officially buried on February 22, 1999. On a day which is now referred to as ‘Chainsaw Monday’, Sierra Entertainment - the company behind legendary adventure games such as Kings Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry - axed a third of its workforce including some of their top creative talent. Scott Murphy, co-creator of Space Quest, was one of the many to be given the boot. In this interview, he speaks openly about the price the employees paid with the companies growing success; like being paid less despite incredible success of the games they worked on. But what is most apparent from the interview is the deep hurt that was inflicted by the company heads on their brilliant team who invested all they had in producing a revolutionary series of games.

Cherish the Small Stuff

Confucius say:

 You can stand with your back to the sea and shoot fish in a barrel, but you ignoring the giant shark which eat people and boats.

Okay, Confucius wasn't around at the time when Jaws graced the big screen. But if he was and he worked on technology projects then he would have said something like that. Probably.

What this pearl of wisdom means in real terms is this. If you are working on a big project and you need to reduce timescales, axing the simple stuff is not only ineffectual but will ultimately be to the detriment of whatever you produce.

The Seven Truths of Open Source Software

Open Source Software is often described as 'free' software; as in 'free' speech rather than 'free' beer. I find this a distracting explanation as the words 'free beer' summon images of flipping burgers on a sizzling barbecue whilst taking large slugs of ice cold lager. See, I bet the last thing you feel like doing now is reading about boring old Open Source Software. But we must continue and quench your also parched brain with some delicious knowledge.