I’ll be speaking at Deploy hosted by Seattle 2.0 on November 8, 2010. Building upon a couple of my blog posts (Pre-Launch and Post-Launch) I will be speaking on the engineering execution for a successful Launch. Here is an outline of the topics I will cover.
1. Stability
- Security: store and retrieve hashed password, encrypt sensitive information, field validation through JS, Ruby, Java, and DB constraints
- Bugs: prioritize mission critical vs. look and feel
- Background Processes: nightly cron jobs, data imports
- Browser Interoperability Issues: IE Hacks, Litmus
2. Scale
- Identify bottlenecks through performance testing: JMeter, New Relic, profilers
- Front-End Optimizations: JS compression, sprite images, measure page load and rendering times
- Back-End Optimizations: index database tables, avoid costly joins, identify “growth tables”, lazy loading and load fewer columns, caching, process data via db instead of loading into business logic
- User Experience: design around slow processes
3. Support
- Logging
- Error Messages and Error Handling
- Debugging Tools: scripts for redundant queries, DB admin
