There are two excellent ideas in this posting on ZDnet, aside from the observation that you can scale Ruby on Rails if you avoid hitting the disk farm for static content:
1) Have a team devoted to rapid scalable prototyping. (LinkedIn Light Engineering Development)
2) Use free apps for both proof of concept testing and marketing.
Read and enjoy.
Ruby on Rails: scaling to 1 billion page views per month by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett — While a lot of attention has been focused on Twitter with questions about whether Ruby on Rails scales, LinkedIn has been quietly running a RoR application on Facebook that is beating down around 1 billion page view per month. Bumpersticker, a relatively trivial Facebook application that allows you to create a cartoon that you can [...]
Best,
Dak
Categories: Worth reading · agile · cheap · do it now · fast · free · product management · trade-offs
The McKinsey Quarterly has a good interview with Brad Bird (director of The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and Ratatouille). I’ve been following Pixar with great interest over the years, partly because I have a couple of old friends who work there (Hi guys!), and partly because I really believe in what they are doing (changing from being a software vendor in a niche market to being a major motion picture studio: brilliant!). In my opinion, Pixar is the poster child for the “eat your own dog food” school of management, and deserves their success. (How good is Renderman? Well, it’s good enough that we’ve won Oscars with movies we’ve built on it!)
In my experience, THE key issue on the performance of teams is to get the morale and the synergy of the teams going. This involves selecting the right people, keeping the great players in the team, and keeping the ideas flowing.
Here’s a great quote from the interview:
The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Brad is being very low-key here; the emphasis is mine. In my experience, this is exactly correct.
Read the rest of the interview for how and why Brad worked on morale.
What are you doing to increase the morale of your team (and your family, and the broader group of people you work with) TODAY? I’m talking about hugs and compliments; what are you doing to recognize people as individuals, to listen to them, and to make them feel listened to?
More later in the blog, on building a team of “Developers versus Programmers.”
Have a great weekend,
Dak
Categories: Dak · Worth reading · human-in-the-loop · inspiration · people · time management
Tagged: linkedin
The New York Times has published an article summarizing a very interesting study: based on market volatility, the notion of shifting from equities to bonds as we age may not be as useful as has been thought. Worth reading.
Best,
Dak
Categories: Worth reading · trade-offs
