Today: Organizations, Ghosts, and Other Puzzling Matters

Facing wild and scary things head-on  View in browser >

1. Failures past, present, and yet to come How do organizations learn? It’s fairly uncontroversial to say that we—both individuals and organizations—learn from consequences. But what sorts of consequences do we learn from? When Steven Shorrock leafed through a copy of A Christmas Carol, certain parallels struck him: Scrooge could be seen as an analogy for how we have come to see “the organization.” But while Scrooge learned from his experience with the ghosts of the past, present, and future, this doesn’t necessarily ring true for organizations. Why can’t organizations learn from failure? Shorrock muses on this and other puzzling matters as he strives to make sense of certain assumptions we cling to when it comes to failure. Did we mention that Shorrock is keynoting at Velocity in Barcelona? 2. The DevOps-y engineer When a friend asked Mike Pachenko if he knew of any DevOps people worth hiring, Pachenko found himself asking clarifying questions about the sort of person his friend had in mind, like what exactly is a DevOps person? He rolled it into three qualities or attitudes the DevOps engineer possesses. Ultimately, it's all about the big picture. 3. Only 17 days until Velocity in Barcelona At Velocity in Barcelona, we've lined up speakers from Google, Mozilla, The Guardian, Baidu, Twitter, Telefónica, BBC, the Financial Times, the UK Digital Services team—and many others—to share their experiences and methodologies. It's the best training possible for building and maintaining high performance sites and services. HappeningNovember 17–19—don't miss out. See the schedule → 4. 6 scary things you should know about your website It's Halloween, and in the spirit of this spooky season, Tammy Everts is offering an infographic rife with scary stats on ecommerce performance. 5. Everything is distributed The image of the lone programmer coding a standalone application has faded like the last colors of sunset on the horizon. Good-bye. Now, software development has reached a point where no single developer can understand, see, or control all the component parts, whether it’s technical or organizational. Everything is Distributed is a collection of 5 thought-provoking essays byCourtney Nash and Mike Loukides on the new frontier of software. It's free, and just one of a wealth of free ebooks on DevOps, web performance, and operations. Sponsored Content Building a flexible delivery architecture You want to deliver a positive experience for your website users, right? If you don’t want to end up like the thousands of fragmented, poorly designed sites that litter the Web, you can turn to DevOps and continuous deployment for help, or use site data to pinpoint what needs changing. But you really know how to put it all together? Learn how to deliver the rich, interactive experience your users deserve. Register now for a free webcast on building flexibile delivery architecures. Happening Tuesday, November 4 at 11am PST. 6. Preparing for the holidays: security trends If your site isn't prepared for the holidays by now, you should probably be concerned. At the very least, there are a couple of things you need to know about security right now, including why you should care. 7. When measuring performance wrecks performance Back in July, the DevOps world rejoiced when Apple finally built a Navigation Timing API into Safari, first in the beta release of iOS 8, and then in the public release which came a couple months later. Things are decidedly less cheerful around the office this week, as Apple has quietly removed the Navigation Timing API on mobile due to what it ambiguously refers to as “performance issues.” Craig Lowell speculates on what this means. 8. The wild world Web: developing in uncertainty How can front-end web developers make the transition from known goals and tools to the uncertainty of the modern Web? With ever-changing browsers, platforms, and compatibilities, there's a new set of rules. In this free webcast, author Rob Larsenexplains how web development teams can create sites and applications that perform well on a wide range of present and future devices by combining web standards, progressive enhancement, an iterative approach to design and development, and a desire to question the status quo. Join him on Tuesday, November 11 at 10 am PST.