Brendan's Reflections

  • Praise and Other Words for the Dublin Web Summit, Developer Track

    The Developer Track was a series of 20 min technical talks on the second day of the conference. As Marshall McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message”.  The message here is “We’re not going deep”.  OK – at least if a presentation is not engaging, I’ll only need to sit through 20 mins of it.…

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  • At Heathrow, waiting to depart for Dublin Web Summit. www.websummit.net (Taken with Instagram at Terminal 1)

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  • Velocity EU 2012: Hands-on Web Performance Deep Dive

      Steve Souders, Head Performance Engineering, Google  Patrick Meenan, Google / WebPageTest Steve and Patrick picked apart the performance of several UK Soccer Club websites with WebPageTest and Google Dev Tools.  Some things they covered; WebPageTest is open source, you can run your own instances, customize it. There’s an API, you can automate it when running…

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  • Joel Spolsky’s “Smart and Gets Things Done”

    I picked this book up because of a recommendation from a colleague at work.  We’d been working on developing an interviewer training course.   First of all, this is a terrible cover.  The cartoon images makes it seem like the contents are lightweight.  Although Spolsky has a very casual writing style, the ideas in the…

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  • First visit to London Web Performance Meetup

    Last night I attended the London Web Performance Meetup.  The topic was Application Performance Monitoring and it was done by Martin Pinner of Application Performance Ltd. There always a danger when inviting a vendor to present at a meetup or conference.  I’ve seen it too many times when the vendor can’t help but make a…

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  • Brant Cooper in the founders’ studio

    Two days ago I attended my first London Meetup.  It was with Lean Startup London, and the topic was In The Founders’ Studio With Brant Cooper, Entrepreneurs Guide to Customer Development. The affable host was Salim (‘Sal’) Virani (@SaintSal) who organized it as a open chat with Brant Cooper.  I had never heard of Brant…

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  • On Monetizing Intent

    90%+ of Google’s Revenue comes from monetizing intent.  What does that mean?  It means that google is best positioned to know what you are looking for *right now*.  Because you start your search with them.  So they sell you and your current intentions to advertisers. There is huge $ in knowing the intent of consumers. …

    brendansterne