Agile technology leader and dynamicist
Michael strives to raise the bar and ease the pain for developers across the country. He shares his passion and energy for improvement with everyone he meets, sometimes even with their permission. Michael has spent the better part of 20 years learning what it means to be a professional programmer who cares about art, quality, and craft. He's always ready to spend time with other developers who are fully engaged and devoted to their work--the "wide awake" developers. On the flip side, he cannot abide apathy or wasted potential.Michael has been a professional programmer and architect for nearly 20 years. During that time, he has delivered running systems to the U. S. Government, the military, banking, finance, agriculture, and retail industries. More often than not, Michael has lived with the systems he built. This experience with the real world of operations changed his views about software architecture and development forever.
He worked through the birth and infancy of a Tier 1 retail site and has often served as "roving troubleshooter" for other online businesses. These experiences give him a unique perspective on building software for high performance and high reliability in the face of an actively hostile environment.
Most recently, Michael wrote "Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software", a book that realizes many of his thoughts about building software that does more than just pass QA, it survives the real world. Michael previously wrote numerous articles and editorials, spoke at Comdex, and co-authored one of the early Java books.
Presentations by Michael Nygard
Failure Comes in Flavors: Part Two
What can we do about the dismal uptime of typical applications? We are asked to provide "five nines", but only reach 88%, on average. Come learn how to prevent the Stability Antipatterns from biting you. Apply these Stability Patterns to contain damage, recover from shocks, and survive disasters.In part 1, we looked at common sources of system failure: those commonly created structures that exacerbate problems.
Now, we'll take on Stability Patterns that not only stop the antipatterns, but also add resilience to your system. Apply your new failure-oriented mindset to unchain yourself from the pager and save your company from embarrassing--and costly--disasters.
These patterns combat entire classes of failure modes, making your system robust against even unforeseen problems.
The 90 Minute Startup
What do you get when you add agile programming, automated deployment, self-describing systems, and virtualization? You get the quickest path from a great idea to a live site.In this session, Michael will create and deploy a fully-functional web site. By the end of 90 minutes, you will be able to access the fully-deployed site live on the 'Net.
It used to take weeks and months to stand up a new site. You had to buy hardware, rent (or build) space, rack, stack, and cable it, and then you'd finally get to start installing operating systems, databases, and so on.
These days, none of that is necessary. You can run a real business on the net without ever owning anything. Best of all, you can be up and running in a single day.
Design for Operations
If your software fails in production, nobody will care how great the development project was, or how well the system passed QA. Production operations, the domain of your systems' least-appreciated stakeholders, is where the rubber meets the road. Come learn how to build your systems to thrive in Operations.Failure Comes in Flavors: Part One
The typical JEE application does not reach the fabled "five nines" of availability. Far from it. It's more like "double eights". Come see why enterprise applications and web sites are only serving users 88% of the time instead of 99.999%.The bad news: applications are more complex and error-prone than ever. Site development projects are really enterprise application integration projects in disguise. SOA portends far-flung interdependencies among unreliable services. Failures will spread wider and wider, reaching across your company and even crossing boundaries between companies.
How do monumentally costly failures begin, develop, and spread?
Can they be averted?
Once you hit Release 1.0, your system will be living in the real world. It has to survive everything the messy, noisy real world can throw at it: from flash mobs to Slashdot. Once the public starts beating on your system, it has to survive--without you.
Did you know that just having your database behind a firewall can bring down your system? Ill show you that and many other risks to your system. You will learn the biggest risks to your system and how to counter them with stability design patterns. We'll talk about the best way to define the term "availability" and why the textbooks get it all wrong.
Wide Awake Developers
An ongoing examination of what it means to be an IT professional in today's world.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
A couple of years ago, the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport introduced self-pay parking gates. Scan a credit card on the way in and on the way out, and it just debits the card. This obviously saves money on parking attendants, and it's pretty convenient for parkers.
At first, to encourage adoption, they offered a discount of $2 per day. Every time you'd approach the entry, a friendly voice from a Douglas Adams novel would ask, "Would you like to save $2 per day on parking?" For general parking, that meant $14 instead of $16 per day.
Some time later, this switched from being an incentive for adopting the system to a penalty for avoiding it. How? They raised the rates by $2 per day. So now, the top rate if you use self-pay is back to $16. If you don't use it, then your top rate bumped up to $18. Clearly they put somebody from the banking industry in charge of this parking system.
Now, it's changed again, from $2 per day to $2 per transaction. So it's just $2 off the top of whatever your overall parking fees are.
This gradual creep is really interesting. I wonder what the next step will be. A $2 per year discount would be one way to approach it. Maybe a "frequent parker" program. More likely the discount will drop to $1 per transaction, or it will just be discarded altogether.
That's OK with me, because swiping the credit card is still more convenient than exchanging cash money with a human anyway.
Besides, back when it was cash based, I always got tagged with the ATM fee anyway.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Wordle has been meming it's way around the 'Net lately. Figured I'd join the crowd by doing a word cloud for Release It. This is from the preface.
Considering that this is just from fairly simple text analysis, I'm surprised at how accurately it represents the key concerns. "Software" and "money" have roughly equal prominence. "Life" appears near the middle, along with "excitement", "revenue", "production" and "systems". Not bad for an algortihm.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
InfoQ posted a video of Jim Webber and Martin Fowler doing a keynote speech at QCon London this Spring. It's a brilliant deconstruction of the concept of the Enterprise Service Bus. I can attest that they're both funny and articulate (whether on the stage or off.)
Along the way, they talk about building services incrementally, delivering value at every step along the way. They advocate decentralized control and direct alignment between services and the business units that own them.
I agree with every word, though I'm vaguely uncomfortable with how often they say "enterprise man boobs".
Saturday, June 7, 2008
An odd thing happened to me today. Actually, an odd thing happened yesterday, but it's having the same odd thing happen today that really makes it odd. With me so far?
Yesterday, while I was shopping at Amazon, Amazon told me that my American Express card had expired. While it is set for a May expiration, it's several years in the future. I didn't think too much of it, because when I re-entered the same information, Amazon accepted it.
Today, I got the same thing with the same card on iTunes!
Online stores don't do a whole lot with your credit cards. For the most part, they just make a call out to a credit card processor. Small stores have to go through a second-tier CCVS system that charges a few pennies per transaction. Large ones---and do they get larger than Amazon?---generally connect directly to a payment processor. The payment processor may charge a fraction of a cent per transaction, but they definitely make it up in volume.
(There are other business factors, too, like the committed transaction volume, response time SLAs, and the like.)
Asynchronously, the payment processor collects from the issuing bank. It's the issuing bank that actually bills you, and sets your interest rate and payment terms.
Whereas VISA and MasterCard work with thousands of issuers, American Express doesn't. When you get an AmEx card, they are the issuing bank as well as the payment processor.
Which makes it highly suspect that the same card gave me the same error through two different sites. It makes me think that American Express has introduced a bug in their validation system, causing spurious declines for expiration.
Friday, June 6, 2008
I mentioned Tom DeMarco just a couple of days ago. I'm re-reading his great book, Why Does Software Cost So Much?
Personally, I credit Tom as one of the unsung progenitors of the agile movement. Long before we had "Agile" or even "lightweight methods", Tom was talking about the psycho-social nature of software development.
For instance, here's an excerpt from essay 8, "Nontechnological Issues in Software Engineering":
Imagine your boss just plunked a specification on your desk and asked, "How long will it take you and one other person to get this job done?" What's the first question out of your mouth?
Would you ask, "Can we use object-oriented methods?" or "What CASE system can we buy?" or "Is it okay to use rapid prototyping?" Of course not. Your first question is,
Who is the other person?
Absolutely. Right on, Tom.