How devops can help speed application development
Devops, an emerging concept in application development circles, is, at heart, a simple idea. It refers to the practice of aligning an organization's developmental environment more closely with its operational environment so developers will better know what changes to make to an application, based on performance metrics and feedback from administrators.
While such an idea may appear obvious, large organizations have tended to keep their developers apart from the operational folks who use the software. "Years ago, developers would make software and shrink-wrap it, and system administrators were left alone to figure out how to effectively deploy it, upgrade it, and scale it," said Tom Limoncelli, a co-chairman for this year's Usenix LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference, which will feature a number of talks that explore the devops concept. Read more...
Win 8 haters are just scared of change, say MS bosses
Microsoft has tweaked the Windows 8 interface following feedback from last month's developer preview.
The company will let you customize the start screen in a move that'll likely favour the Metro UI-version of Windows 8 that Microsoft is targeting at fondleslabs, if we've parsed a lengthy blog post here correctly.
The lengthy post is larded with user reaction data that now forms the basis of the Windows group's justification of Windows 8 features and rebuttals to critics.
After weighing up the feedback, Redmond's developers have rather gently suggested that some of those objecting to changes in the Start Screen in Windows 8 are just reacting to change, no matter whether it's good or bad. Read more...
BI: ‘Voice of the customer’ programs combine feedback in one place
About 18 months ago, Charming Shoppes launched a customer insights project to "deliver actionable customer and market research and analysis to the business," according to Jeffrey H. Liss, who headed up the initiative. Liss is now senior vice president of corporate strategy at the plus-size women's clothing retailer.
Before that time, the company collected and disseminated customer feedback in a less than organized way, Liss recalls. Various departments and brand groups received input from customer emails and online product reviews, and store personnel received verbal comments from shoppers. Anything deemed relevant was "passed up the command chain" to top executives via email distribution lists, Liss says. As a result, "We had a lot of anecdotal information floating around," and executives had no way to distinguish important data from rumor, he reports. Read more...
What I lost on the Google+ Diet
On July 8, I went on the Google+ Diet, using Google's new social network for all my online communication. As part of the diet, I stopped using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and several other services. I even stopped using e-mail.
As I explained in my column last week, the purpose of the experiment was to see if consolidating and streamlining all social activity into Google+ was possible and, if so, desirable. (You can follow my experiment here, even if you're not a Google+ member.)
I was able to answer my two questions on day one of my Google+ Diet. Yes, it's possible, and yes, it's desirable.
More interestingly, however, I found out all kinds of surprising things about Google+ and about using Google+ as the one-and-only medium for online communication. Here's what I learned: Read more...