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Your graphic designer is an artist, a trained expert in aesthetics, a master at conveying messages via images and feelings via fonts. He may also be slowing your site down so much that nobody is seeing it.

Artists tend to be heavy on the quality and lighter on the practicality of what they deliver. It's not entirely their fault. Even the most conscientious and experienced designer needs to sell his work and quality sells. Do marketing departments want to see their company advertised in 4K glory or on their mom's 19″ LCD?

Quality isn't worth the cost.

January 22, 2015 tutorial

January 18, 2015 review

Here are five things that make Couchbase a go-to service in any architecture.

Couchbase is simple to setup.

Keep It Simple. It's one of the axioms of system administration. Couchbase, though complicated under the hood, makes it very simple to setup even complicated clusters spanning multiple data centers.

Every node comes with a very user friendly web interface including the ability to monitor performance across all the nodes in the same machine's cluster.

Adding nodes to a cluster is as simple as plugging in the address of the new node after which, all the data in the cluster is automatically rebalanced between the nodes. The same is true when removing nodes.

Couchbase is built to never require downtime which makes it a pleasure to work with.

January 16, 2015 review

You know those really annoying popup messages you get on your phone when you're browsing? They aren't easy to ignore like popups on your desktop. They are really, get in your face, make it hard to see the site you wanted to see, annoying. Well, I confess. I helped make those and I'm really sorry.

It was maybe two years ago and someone came to me with a new gimmick (That's really all of AdTech summarized in one word: Gimmick ). It wasn't the first time. I'd done a lot of work building affiliate marketing programs and ad servers. It was, however, possibly the most evil thing I have ever done and I apologize.

January 13, 2015 rant

You know the elephant in the room, the one no one wants to talk about. Well it turns out there was a whole herd of them hiding in my cloud. There's a herd of them hiding in your cloud too. I'm sure of it. Here is my story and how I learned to wrangle the elephants in the cloud.

Like many of you, my boss walked into my office about three years ago and said "We need to move everything to the cloud." At the time, I wasn't convinced that moving to the cloud had technical merit. The business, on the other hand, had decided that, for whatever reason, it was absolutely necessary.

As I began planning the move, selecting a cloud provider, picking tools with which to manage the deployment, I knew that I wasn't going to be able to provide the same quality of service in a cloud as I had in our server farm. There were too many unknowns.

January 11, 2015 thoughts