There’s a really basic basic I didn’t mention

Our environment is well enough setup that we can make use of basic math to predict what we need come production hardware wise but some of that is a function of the overall side of environment we require right now. As we grow that will become more difficult to do and probably require us to focus more on “dark releases”.

“But if you’ve set-up your environment to maximise application performance for some performance work you might eliminate all of your scheduled jobs so you can focus on the KPI you are interested in. You need to remember to turn all of these back on when you are doing proper load testing, as you need to be as like live as possible.”

Another good bit of advice – automation of course is key to making that “turn off the jobs, turn on the jobs” thing work well. Oh and our perennial favourite monitoring can help too

Thanks for the feedback and the encouragement – been busy of late and taken some time to figure out what’s “safe” to blog about commercially speaking. Let’s see if I can’t push up that blog post rate….

You also need to make sure that you’ve properly recreated your production environment, if you are running the batch jobs – it sounds like you are pretty much there.

But if you’ve set-up your environment to maximise application performance for some performance work you might eliminate all of your scheduled jobs so you can focus on the KPI you are interested in. You need to remember to turn all of these back on when you are doing proper load testing, as you need to be as like live as possible.

This is another good blog entry Dan, you should post more often !

Alex

THINKING is hard, typing is easy.

“Like the software industry, the newbies are infatuated with cool tools for a period of time, which only wears off after they gain experience in the work and are on their 2nd or 3rd set of tools.”

In my own experience I’ve seen that to be true, unfortunately I’ve also seen many an “experienced worker” continue to fall into the trap. One might claim that maturity of the industry, not just the individual workers is required I guess…..

That’s not been my experience in construction. Twenty-somethings get excited about saws and power drills and hammers all the time. Like the software industry, the newbies are infatuated with cool tools for a period of time, which only wears off after they gain experience in the work and are on their 2nd or 3rd set of tools.

Replace “smart techie” with “experienced worker” and your statements ring truer. I’m not convinced there are any shortcuts to that.

I think the problem is around naming them as things with nouns rather than actions with verbs. The ignorance conundrum (you can’t know something if you don’t already know it) is particularly bad with nouns because if you don’t understand all the implied nouns, you’ll hit the problem you describe. If you describe with verbs, it’s much more likely going to imply direction to take which then leads to other directions.

Cheers!

Indeed, I just feel it’s rather more widespread than ought to be acceptable for a professional discipline. Goes into the same box as all the developers and architects that wait with bated breath for vendors to tell them what next great thing is, and of course it turns out to be whatever the vendor wants to sell

“So just use a word that is ugly enough that people wont want to use it for their own purposes.
How about the Pragmaticistic Dictator?”

Love it.

“But at present, the word [pragmatism] begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. … So then, the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism”, which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. (C. S. Peirce, CP 5.414.)”
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmaticism

So just use a word that is ugly enough that people wont want to use it for their own purposes.
How about the Pragmaticistic Dictator?

Jason

“Also, how calm and analytic can one be when a senior exec is standing over one’s shoulder screaming about lost revenue?”

We’ve all seen that sort of thing haven’t we?

To take a positive view: It’s worth taking the courage to exploit the opportunity and explain how things can be changed to ensure it doesn’t happen again. One method I’ve used is to perform a postmortem which of course will identify all those cut corners as the root cause and prescribe solutions.

Hope you’re keeping well!