Hanselminutes Podcast 175 - Optimizing Your Website with Jeff Atwood and Stackoverflow
My one-hundred-and-seventy-fifth podcast is up. It's the return of Jeff Atwood. He and the team have been making lots of great speed optimizations to Stackoverflow lately. What tools are they using? What kinds of speed improvements are they seeing, and what can you do to exploit their experience?
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Telerik is our sponsor for this show.
Check out their UI Suite of controls for ASP.NET. It's very hardcore stuff. One of the things I appreciate about Telerik is their commitment to completeness. For example, they have a page about their Right-to-Left support while some vendors have zero support, or don't bother testing. They also are committed to XHTML compliance and publish their roadmap. It's nice when your controls vendor is very transparent.
As I've said before this show comes to you with the audio expertise and stewardship of Carl Franklin. The name comes from Travis Illig, but the goal of the show is simple. Avoid wasting the listener's time. (and make the commute less boring)
Enjoy. Who knows what'll happen in the next show?
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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To the question around 25 mins that Scott asks of, does saving those extra bytes really matter when we have so many computing resources ... one thought I might add is that sometimes just that 1 extra byte will throw you into an extra network packet. Typically packets are fast, especially sent one after the other ... but there is always a chance that that one extra packet costs noticeable latency. People may be calling in on their cell phone modem .. or we even get people calling in still on real modems. Packets can be slow. Why risk the extra delay. In the end every little bit really does matter.
I guess that refers to 11pm pacific daylight time, for the rest of us.
Remember the car talk guys suggest we go on Daylight Saving Time year round ... not on Standard Time year round.
Daylight Saving Time is way better, guys. Embrace it.
I am realy curious about the SQL-optimization Jeff talked about. Especially the "not so obvious" tweeks I would like to see. Is there any chance for a Hanselminute about that?
Few points I’d like to make about Stackoverflow and their model.
• The biggest issue I see with stackoverflow as a viable business is the denial in the core team (Joel and Jeff) of stackoverflow being a business.
• We all know that businesses exist to make profits but from day one I have observed a discomfort from Joel and Jeff when they talk about making money.
• I remember in some of the early podcasts Joel was very much against advertising. They made a statement and I’m paraphrasing “people forcefully deposited money in their bank accounts for ads”.
• Later they softened the approach and went easy on advertising. Honestly there is nothing wrong with it. The issue is denial of making money which is never a good thing for any business.
• Stackoverflow also has a vision to create information silos devoid of discussion. This is very much against the raw nature of Internet.
• Stackoverflow is admired by geeks and is not at all understood by non-geeks. This is going to be a major roadblock for them.
• When my mum is looking for something on the internet. She is interested in getting the information without complication of points, rewards, badges etc.
I think these guys need to think it over.
Comments are closed.
It is like: "If we don't need on Stack Overflow, it is a overkill".