Brendan's Reflections

  • The Automattic Creed

    I’m a sucker for a good creed.  Check out Automattic’s: I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know there’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to…

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  • Avoiding Innovation Debt

    Peter Bell wrote an interesting blog entry on Avoiding Innovation Debt.  What he is calling Innovation Debt is the stagnation that follows long periods of failing to invest in the technical skills of engineers. Innovation debt is the cost that companies incur when they don’t invest in their developers. It happens when the team is…

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  • The Virtues of Giving Your Best to B- Environments

    A friend sent me a link to a blog post by David Heinemeier Hansson titled B- Environments Merit B- Effort, and asked me what I thought. The Advice I agree wholeheartedly with this: A star environment is based on trust, vision, and congruent behavior. Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in…

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  • Please, speak to me like I’m stupid

    I feel like I’m getting dementia.  My colleagues communicate with me, in meetings, in emailed reports, in presentations, and I don’t know what they’re talking about – again. [Source: morethandodgeball.com] Part of the problem is that I’m in London, and they’re in Austin (or New York or San Francisco).  It’s morning for them, and evening for…

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  • Download / Scrape Salesforce Reports in 4 lines of Python

    Python Code: import requests l = requests.get(“https://login.salesforce.com/?un=USERNAME&pw=PASSWORD”) d = requests.get(“https://na3.salesforce.com/REPORT_ID?view=d&snip&export=1&enc=UTF-8&xf=csv”,cookies=l.cookies) print d.content References: http://sfdc-heretic.warped-minds.com/2006/04/10/progmatic-access-to-salesforcecom-reports/ http://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/quickstart/#cookies http://www.techsmog.com/index.php/2011/02/08/parsing-real-time-salesforce-com-reports-via-perlcgi-html-tables/

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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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