Adventures on a mini-bike amongst the boxes in engineering:

External view:

Internal view:

Dev destroys support in a 4 on 4 boat race.

For all you hardcore Web 2.0 fanboys, I’m giving a talk at AjaxWorld on “High-Performance AJAX Application Design” down in Santa Clara at the end of September. The official blurb is:

Designing an AJAX application that meets enterprise scalability and performance requirements presents technical challenges that aren’t addressed by traditional AJAX frameworks. This session will highlight the techniques used in Splunk to address handling large amounts of data in the browser, persistent multi-panel state management, interface customization and localization, and interactive DOM-accessible graphics support. By leveraging existing, though less common, techniques such as iframe-style AJAX, in-browser XSLT, and contextual CSS, modern browsers can provide a compelling interface without the need for a thick-client installation.

Come by and say hi.

On a daily basis, I pay homage to the wonder that is Blue Bottle Coffee espresso, which flows freely — some would say excessively — from our kitchen. The benefits to productivity that this fine coffee bestows upon the dev team is enormous, easily eclipsing other contenders such as video games or foosball. Of course, there were some hurdles to get to this point, namely somebody pouring M&Ms into the bean grinder of the super-automatic that was previously in service. The result was a pitiful molten mess of chocolate, beans, plastic, and gears. And, of course, the perpetrator was never discovered. So the only recourse was to beef up the machinery and move to a true commercial setup: a La Spaziale, Mazzer Mini, and freshly delivered Blue Bottle. BB even asked us what hardware we were running, and sent us the most compatible beans. Brilliant.