BarCamp Leeds was held on Saturday 17th of November at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. A BarCamp is an open, participatory workshop, whose content is provided by participants, often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. Wikipedia has a good description of what a BarCamp actually is, here
The Leeds event was a resounding success and was expertly organised.
The venue was divided into 4 presentation rooms of various sizes and the attendees were given the chance to step forward and do a presentation on the topic of their choice. We had approximately 30 presentations throughout the day on various topics.
PlusNet were sponsors of the event. We gave a couple of new iPhones to the best presenters; which seemed to go down well.
One of the key reasons I went along was to look at recruiting some talented software developers into our team in Sheffield. Over the course of the day I met a bunch of really good people who’ll be coming along to see us in the next few weeks and will hopefully be joining our team.
I’ll not go into huge detail about everything that went on during the day, you can see all the other blogs on BarCamp Leeds on the Technorati website, here .
There are also a bunch of Leeds BarCamp photos on Flickr, here.
PlusNet is committed to being involved with the local and national Community events such as this. We are regular attendees of the monthly OpenCoffee events in Sheffield and also the GeekUp events in Leeds. We consider it extremely valuable to be in touch with what’s going on out there in the community and are always happy to give others the benefit of our experience.
If you want to know what’s going on in your area, the best thing to do is subscribe to the Yahoo Upcoming service. This gives details of all the events in your area that you’d otherwise be unaware of. You can sign up for this service, here.
Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet
The report from the IPCC (the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) came out yesterday morning and already is being picked up by all and sundry. Thousands of scientists the world over peer reviewed this 4th issue and the top level findings are:
* 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in instrumental records of global surface temperatures (since 1850)
* Global average sea level has risen since 1961 at an average rate of 1.8mm per year – but since 1993 at an average rate of 3.1mm
* Temperature changes will depend on how much CO2 is emitted, but different scenarios see the increase by 2100 ranging from 0.3C to 6.4C
* Up to 30 per cent of the world’s species are at increased risk of extinction after a 2C temperature rise
* Between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa could suffer water shortages by 2020; in Asia, heavily-populated “mega-deltas” are at greatly increased risk of flooding; tropical forest in eastern Amazonia will turn to savannah by mid-century
The full report can be found at:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf
and the Independent article can be found at:-
http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article3174386.ece
Irrespective of how you feel regarding the subject matter it proves that the Internet “enables” this type of collaboration and conversation in a better way than any other communication mechanism ever available.
regards
Dean
It may be the end of the day for the business but as usual there are still many folks around, tapping away at their keyboards to meet those deadlines. Me, I’m leaving soon but I’ve still got a 3 hour journey before I get to home sweet home in London’s East End! More…
FOWA: Loading times. How can we speed things up?
Last month I attended the Future of Web Apps (FoWA) conference in London. So as a PHP developer here at PlusNet, how did this conference help me, and what are we doing at PlusNet take these lessons on board?
I’m going to focus on one of the presentation from the conference titled “High performance Websites” and was presented by Steve Saunders who is the chief of Performance at Yahoo.
Making your page fast for first time and regular visitors is key to a better user experience. If your first impression of the PlusNet service is a slow and clunky website, then you may feel – and rightly, that the rest of the service we offer would be slow and clunky. Also if you regularly use our website and the performance drops, you would wonder what other services are no longer what they should be. This isn’t only true for our customers, but true for the employee’s here in PlusNet as well. There are many tools we use to automate our systems, to give you a quicker and more reliable server. If these tools are slow, then they loose there usefulness, and they start to hinder rather than help.
As with most business, we have a programme in place to help scale our business to improve our current service and plan for future requirements.
Part of that scaling involves scaling our web servers, to deal with more and more customers using our Portal, and improve the service that they are receiving.
So where would you start? Adding new web servers? Upgrading hardware with faster processors or more memory?
These are all valid options, and part of our web server scaling programme. But we’re also looking at what we can improve at the front-end.
Yahoo’s performance golden rule is: optimize front-end performance first, that’s where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent.
There are three main reasons why front-end performance is the place to start.
1.There is more potential for improvement by focusing on the front-end. Cutting it in half reduces response times by 40% or more, whereas cutting back-end performance in half results in less than a 10% reduction.
2.Front-end improvements typically require less time and resources than back-end projects (redesigning application architecture and code, finding and optimizing critical code paths, adding or modifying hardware, distributing databases, etc.).
3.Front-end performance tuning has been proven to work. Over fifty teams at Yahoo! have reduced their end-user response times by following our performance best practices, often by 25% or more.
Only 5% of the end-user response time is spent fetching the HTML document. This result holds true for almost all web sites. In sampling the top ten U.S. websites, all but one spend less than 20% of the total response time getting the HTML document. The other 80+% of the time is spent dealing with what’s in the HTML document, namely, the front-end. That’s why the key to faster web sites is to focus on improving front-end performance.
I could go through all of the best practices which Yahoo has devised for speeding up your web site, but they’ve made a good job of it themselves, you can see the 14 golden rules here:-
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
You can also view the “High performance Websites” presentation here:-
http://www.slideshare.net/techdude/high-performance-web-sites
Yahoo have also created a Firefox add-on, that allows you to analyse any website, and grade them against each of the rules.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
So how are we taking this rules into our development process here at PlusNet?
Every developer will read the Yahoo 14 rules and our new starter guide has been updated to include this, so even though we are all aware of these rules, it will reinforce their importance.
Now reading rules is fine, but we need to put these into practice, so, every developer will optimise at least one page over the next 3 months. Whilst it would be more efficient to allocate the work to a single team, one of this programme’s goals is to up-skill all development staff.
This programme of work will contribute to faster page load times for both the customer facing aspects of our platform, together with the same sort of increased performance for all our internal tools and applications.
Learning occurs by doing, therefore as a result of what we’re doing all the development staff learn some extremely important new skills which will then be put to use by default every time they write a piece of code.
Ben Walton
Senior Developer, PlusNet
Wow, Friday has come around quickly this week! I’ve spent a lot of time today in meetings today, most importantly a wash up meeting to talk about how our PCI network improvement roll out went this week, and a great workshop where we brainstormed ways to generate sales lifts and publicity. Nick (Head of Sales) has told me I can’t tell you any of our ideas, but I will say this: “If we gave you £1,000,000, how would you use it to publicise PlusNet?” Answers in the comments please.
Now, on with the EOD reports!
Finally, they’ve let me edit an EOD! Unlike my normal essays I’m trying to make this one as short and snappy as they come.
The big news today was the successful changeover to our new shiny PCI compliant network. This has been a major project and is the culmination of many months of planning and implementation work. More…
The Register is reporting that according to The Times, upto 50% of internet users in the UK have “stolen” someone else’s Wireless Service.
Yes! More information about the Chumby!
More…
This post is intended to be a little timely. Five’s Gadget Show have just launched a campaign regarding broadband speeds. The industry uses the terms “up to” such as “up to 8Mbps” for reasons which we’ll cover off a bit later. But we’d like to throw down the gauntlet so to speak and ask customers what they think we, and others, should do to better explain the product that is being sold.
More…
It’s been a busy (and somewhat exciting) day at PlusNet with the news that… More…
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