on Doing It Wrong
From Tim Bray’s piece on enterprise systems:
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
I have spent years on the enterprise side of development and pushed on occasion for more iterative development methodologies and can say that the more successful projects I can recall started as a more simple effort and grew. Those that attempted to solve all the problems with the flip of a switch got mired in change requests and requirements docs and in the end made everyone just want to deploy the thing so we could move on.
I have a great sense of accomplishment for the systems I have been a part of constructing, developing and then maintaining but many came before the Internet had as many options and examples as there are today. Building a large scale, flexible CMS in the late ’90’s for example didn’t offer any options to pull from open source or commercial products and tools. Today that is different and I think most companies are starting to understand.
In the last few years with two different large Internet companies I can say that the enterprise is starting to come around. While there are still a few core competencies that are worth that do it all yourself mantra, most are now seen as a utility that should be handled in the most efficient manner possible. It might be that since the two companies I have experience with are both on the Internet side of things and thus faster to catch on, but I think that most companies are realizing that there is no need to write code every time a need arises.
The push for change needs to come from more folks at my level – those that have the authority to make decisions and the influence to explain the potential rewards over the perceived risks. I agree with many of the comments that the enterprise is focused on no risk (or transferring that risk to a partner) and that often backs them into a let’s do it ourselves corner. The job for the next class of leaders and executives is to understand the new Internet culture and take some of this and weave it into the enterprise. This will empower the development teams (and the product teams) and should result in more innovative projects coming from not just the startups but from the once staunch Fortune 1,000 as well.
A great data visualization
So I may be a bit biased since I was there for most of these events, but I found this image, created by feltron, to be very cool.
It mentions in the post that CNN asked him to create a visual record of the site’s last 13 years. I would love to have a higher resolution version (think poster size) but don’t know if anyone will bother to create it.
Breaking records at CNN.com
TechCrunch already has a story this morning on our numbers from yesterday. I have now participated in 4 Election cycles with CNN.com, each time breaking records. Of course today will likely upset the numbers from yesterday but it is still great to see us do so well.
It is wild to think back on how far we have advanced in covering this event. From the 1996 Election where our results system was a Webmaster huddled over his computer and Election terminal to now where a full team of developers has built and supported a system feeding both TV and the web.
I have the benefit of leading an outstanding team that made this look easy. Kudos to all of them for the hard work and preparation for last night.
Record Traffic Day At CNN.com: 27 Million Uniques, 276 Million Page Views
HTML 5 spec not released until 2022?
So will we really still be waiting for HTML 5 to get ratified in 2022? Of course the browsers will be supporting the new version before then and we are starting to see the advancements creep into browsers already. They likely will fully support the spec ahead of its official launch but this means that interpretations and more critically implementations can be slightly different and those left building the websites are stuck doing what we do now, accommodate all the variations in how browsers handle the code.
Ian Hickson, the editor of the HTML 5 specification, recently outlined the time table for HTML 5 and, even assuming browser manufacturers embrace HTML 5 when it reaches the final draft stage, that puts HTML 5’s widespread adoption at 2012. Worse, the final proposed recommendation won’t be released until 2022.
HTML 5 Won’t Be Ready Until 2022. Yes, 2022. – monkey_bites
Chrome = Fast
Today Google released Chrome a new beta browser that puts Google in direct competition with Microsoft and Mozilla.
My first impression (and consistent with other comments and developers) is just how fast it renders web pages. Now it still has its issues and we are working to identify those across all our properties, but man does it seem to out perform my other browsers in my casual tests.
I can’t wait for more testing to appear online.
