Joseph Scott » recommended-reading

Recommended Reading: James Hamilton

Joseph Scott — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:33:45 +0000

If you are really into the nuts and bolts of data centers, large scale networks, and large scale computing then James Hamilton‘s posts make for some good reading. He’s a “Vice President and Distinguished Engineer on the Amazon Web Services team”, which is really just the tip of the iceberg in his work history.

So why read his posts? Because he talks about some of the hard problems faced in the world of data centers. Take for instance his recent High Scale Network Research post. How would you put together a reasonably priced test bed to stress your new network configuration/hardware that has to support 10,000 servers?

I’ll be honest, I don’t fully understand everything that James writes. That’s part of the reason why he’s on my recommended reading list, trying to follow along makes me work intellectually.

Recommended Reading: Simon Willison

Joseph Scott — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:42:39 +0000

If you are into web tech then Simon Willison should be on your reading list. His list of links and commentary are a filtering system that I rely on for finding out about other interesting things that are going on.

Simon’s feed: http://feeds.simonwillison.net/swn-everything

Recommended Reading: Steve Souders, High Performance Web Sites

Joseph Scott — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:12:49 +0000

Although I link to various sites when something interesting comes up, I haven’t done a good job of recommending people and blogs to follow. Time to fix that.

Kicking off my recommended reading list is the High Performance Web Sites blog by Steve Souders. I’ll make this very simple, if you do web development at all this blog is REQUIRED reading. When it comes to front end web performance Steve has literally written the book on the subject (High Performance Web Sites), twice (Even Faster Web Sites).

I was at his WordCamp SF 2009 session where he made changes to a test site during the session and showed how each change improved the page load time. If you aren’t able to make it to an event where Steve is speaking several of his session videos are online, like this 2009 Google I/O session – Even Faster Websites. It’s worth the time to see what his research has turned up on how browsers work.