Jacob Rosenberg’s Blog

I’m pleased to announce that on Tuesday, April 17th, I’ll be presenting a brief discussion of Geographic Distribution at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. As the web matures, performance has become a tremendous issue, especially when deploying an application for a global audience. One important way to improve performance is the geographic distribution of application delivery. Join me at 8:30am tomorrow in 2018, or check out my slides, which will be posted shortly after the discussion.

One of the more interesting questions in technology is how to know when it’s time for it to change. David Habib writes today about a concept he calls Technology Vendor Stockholm Syndrome, which occurs when technologists have worked so long with a vendor that they develop what he calls an unhealthy partnership with them. I’d argue it goes even deeper: there’s such a thing as a Technology Stockholm Syndrome that can develop around any sort of technology, even in the absence of vendor advocates.

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A surprisingly high number of the people I know who work in Technology Operations roles around the industry have parents who think they fix broken Outlook installations for a living. This is a not a reflection on their parents, per se, but rather it represents the challenge of distinguishing an Operations role from an IT role. Most people who work in any modern organization have interactions with IT staff, making the identification quite easy (Oh, that’s what little Johnny does). The problem with this identification is that it is probably wrong.

DISCLAIMER: This is also not a negative reflection on IT staff. Certainly, there a distinction between the roles, but I mean absolutely no disrespect of any kind to the helpful and hardworking people who keep computing systems running everywhere.
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Successful web products don’t just grow, they grow explosively. If people love something about them, they’ll tell everyone they know about them, and they tell their friends, and before you know it, a product in stealth mode is getting used everywhere from Akron, Ohio to Harare, Zimbabwe. It’s around this time that just being on a couple of servers in a rack somewhere isn’t enough. It’s time for the next Big Step in the evolution of a web site’s scale. Today, I’m covering the “why” of Big Step 2, going multi-site. (more…)

As products get successful, they grow. For client applications that run on someone’s computer, this doesn’t necessarily represent a huge challenge: just make more CDs. For network applications in general, and web products in specific, this presents a different challenge. There are two distinct points in the growth of a web application which represent step functions in the level of complexity. I call these points the Big Steps. Today, I’ll cover Big Step 1, going multi-server.
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AOL spent the better part of the last 10 years doing their best to answer every question about the growing influence of the web with “yes, but” answers. We did acquisitions large (Netscape) and small (Navisoft), invested in technologies, and otherwise built a path which ran in parallel to the rest of the web.

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