michaelnygard.com

In a comment to my last post, gvwilson asks, "Are you aware that the PATRIOT Act means it's illegal for companies based in Ontario, BC, most European jurisdictions, and many other countries to use S3 and similar services?"

Some of you know my obsession with Lean, Agile, and ToC.

Google finally got into the cloud infrastructure game, announcing their Google AppEngine.

Over the last six months, I've grown thoroughly dependent on OmniFocus.

It's an honor and a thrill for me to report that Release It received a Jolt Productivity award!

Or: On my way to San Jose.

I spend most of my time dealing with large sites.

As I was writing my last post, I somehow missed the news that Sun is building their own cloud platform, called Project Caroline.

The trajectory of many high-tech products looks like this: Very expensive.

Agile developers measure their velocity.

Anyone who's addicted to a Blackberry already knows about Monday's four-hour outage.

Tim Ross has published his implementation of the Circuit Breaker pattern from Release It, complete with unit tests.

Catching up on some reading, I finally got a chance to read Ted Neward's article "Pragmatic Architecture: Security".

I seldom plug books---other than my own, that is.

How long is your checklist for setting up a new development environment?

The Jolt Awards have been described as "the Oscar's of our industry".

Somewhere inside every commerce site, there's a bit of code sending emails out to customers.

This week, I had Groundhog Day in December.

Speaking of databases and read/write splitting, Oracle had a session at OpenWorld about it.

It's the time of year for family gatherings, so here's a repulsive group portrait of some nearly universal pathologies.

A number of readers have asked me for reference implementations of the stability and capacity patterns.

What does "done" mean to you?

It's taken me a while to get to this talk.

O'Reilly has announced an upcoming conference called Velocity.

Along with the longer analysis pieces, I've decided to post the entirety of my notes from QCon San Francisco.

Being fast doesn't make you scalable.

Several of the speakers here have echoed two themes about databases. 1.

Several vendors are sponsoring QCon.

One of the great things about virtual infrastructure is that you can treat it as a service.

Dan Pritchett, Technical Fellow at eBay, spoke about "Architecting for Latency".

Sometimes the best interactions at a conference aren't the talks, they're shouting.

Here at QCon, well-known Java developer Cameron Purdy gave a fun talk called "10 Ways to Botch Enterprise Java Scalability and Reliability".

It's often been the case that a difficult problem can be made easier by transforming it into a different representation.

Eric Evans, author of Domain-Driven Design and founder of Domain Language, embodies the philosophical side of programming.

Kent Beck spoke with his characteristic mix of humor, intelligence, and empathy.

I'm at QCon San Francisco this week.

Has anyone ever been happy to listen to their own voice?

Here's an list of books about putting time to work as your own weapon, instead of being victimized by it: The Mind of War The Art of Maneuver Lean Thinking Birth of the Chaordic Age Agile Software Development Lean Software Development Software by Numbers

While I was writing Release It!

"Scalable" is a tricky word.

"Is software Engineering, or is it Art?"

Technical terminology sneaks into common use.

I've long been a fan of the Firebug extension for Firefox.

I've got a new piece up at InfoQ.com, discussing the limits of unit and functional testing: "Functional testing falls short, however, when you want to build software to survive the real world.

Esther Schindler asked if I'd be willing to post my earlier article on staying agile in the face of ITIL at CIO.com.

The Agile Manifesto is explicit about it.

Well, Release It continues to hold the #1 spot in Amazon's "Hot New Releases" list for Design Tools and Techniques.

I've been quiet lately for a couple of reasons.

Is it an antipattern to have a consulting firm provide both the coach and developers?