Open eyes Working brain

So, Google is going to kill Wave.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

That’s a great example of why “do one thing well” is better than “do it all”. Not only because, as Gall’s law implies, it’s easier to get a simple system straight, but also because once you get a complex system straight, you still have to make people get their mind around it. Wave made chat and e-mail play well together, with a great replay feature, bots and translation. Twitter gives short text updates. Adoption declared the winner, but we already knew it.

I spoke at Better Software 2010, together with Fullo, about speeding up web applications. The talk draws heavily from Steve’s work, but it’s a little bit different from current literature because it tries to organize best practices not as flat list but under macro-areas emerged as “slow parts”. Also, i concluded with my obsession that complexity inherently introduced by performance optimizations should not be dealt with by programmers directly, but by means of automation and abstraction.

Here it is.

update: now i am linking to the extended version which i gave at phpday 2010

Exactly one year ago i posted here for the first time. A hello world tentatively saying “Let’s see what happens”. Now, a year, 16 posts and more than 1000 unique visitors later i can state that maybe it didn’t happen that much, but i liked the journey. So, let’s celebrate this first year with a collage of people, places, companies, technologies, tools, products, devices, books, etc… that influenced and, sometimes, even inspired me in my professional life . Thanks to all.