When to performance test in production
In my last post about performance testing I wrote about how we decided to do it in production as the ultimate test of success. Performance testing in production is enough to make some operations guys have a panic attack and a few odd looks were dished my way when I raised it on behalf of the team.
Performance testing our Search API
It was midnight on the Friday before Christmas, my seven-week old child was tucked up asleep and I was pretty chilled. All was calm and it was time for bed. Two minutes later I had a phone call, followed by a series of Nagios email alerts, and a need to put my work hat on quickly. The search API was having trouble; as the manager of the team who developed it, I was not looking forward to this. We were having a real slowdown at one of our busiest times of the year – this was going to be fun.
Programme Management, making Agile scale
A lot of us were lucky enough to attend NDC London this year, we even sponsored one of the food stalls. I often see one or more real themes coming from talks at conferences. At NDC London I saw three talks around scaling Agile. Indeed Dan North's (@tastapod) talk was called exactly that. It is a topic OpenTable is trying to make happen. We are about 100 engineers on three continents which is a lot of teams working together.
20% time: Why, as a manager, you should love your engineers to be doing it
We allow all our UK based developers to have some time to explore new technologies, try out prototypes and clean-up things that escape the day-to-day process. Two days out of ten, seems a lot doesn't it?
NDC Oslo
Three OpenTable heroes took to Norway last week to attend NDC Oslo. For two of us it was our first major conference and for one, Paul Stack, he had to speak.