Paul Sizemore

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Oct 24 / 2:51pm

Book Report: Rules for Renegades by Christine Camaford Lynch

Here are a few key quotes from the book: 

"Act it until you are It"

"Fear is mostly about ignorance "

"It's essential that you get stuff done, meaningful stuff - do what it takes to get the results you want. Be ruthless about meeting the right people. "

"Ideas are a dime a dozen, people that implement them are priceless" - Mary Kay Ash

Get your GSD - Getting Stuff Done
1) Rock Responsibility - take 100% responsibility for your life
2) Get Visual - set goals, and make them visual
3) Solicit superb support - use an accountability partner and a master-ming group
4) Toss Toxicity - isolate yourself from those people that drain you
5) Pump up the positive - use positive self talk
6) Log on to the law of attraction - you become what you focus on
7) Preserve - it's okay to be afraid, fail and be rejected - prepare for these, and preserve yourself
8) Pay attention - sometimes when you're concentrating on what you're doing, you miss what's important 
9) Continuously course correct - be honest and clean up messes immediately 
10) Celebrate Successes - one person puts e-bay items on his watch list, and if he closes a sale by that time, he buys the item

Problems + Pain = Profit 
Pay attention / stuff your feelings of fear / go for it
• How will you create your product?
• How will you get the initial customers? 
• What will have to happen to take your company further? 
In a business plan / be concise, complete, compelling 

Build Power, don't borrow it
You are the CEO of your life
power comes from inner confidence 
The quest to build our own power, keep it, grow it. Do it first in the realm that feels easiest, community, family or career. 
What are your internal assets? 
What is your personal brand? What is the brand you want? What power does it convey? 

Rock Rejection and Finesse Failure
Retreat after a whooper failure or rejection to retrench, regain strength & clarity
Failure has rewards, and success has dangers
After failure, spend time to dream
Sometimes you have to change your look for what you want
take 100% responsibility
after failure, do some volunteer work 

Life = the people you meet + what you create together
Energy = Equity
Equity = Access 
Access = Influence 

Leadership
Hire the Fantastic Four  /  Visionary, Leader, Implementer (make things happen- sales & marketing), Infrastructure Builders (create the foundation of the company) 
Rock the Culture
Choose your team wisely 
Build an extended team

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Oct 23 / 12:03pm

Book Report: O'Reily's High Performance Web Sites

I recently read High Performance Web Sites, and these are the notes that I took from the reading: 

Only 10-20% of the response time is downloading the HTML, the rest are the other components. Front end improvements typically take fewer resources than back end improvements. If you cut back end responses in half, that would only decrease the user response times by 5-10%, but cutting the front end response times in half yields a savings of 40-50%. 

1) Make fewer HTTP requests by using image maps, CSS sprites (position in the background of a Div or Span), combine scripts and style sheets. This point provides the largest wins -reduce the number of HTTP requests to the server. Typical savings is 30-45%.

2) Use a Content Delivery Network. The user's proximity to your servers has a large effect on the page response time. The first step is to disperse the component web servers. Do this before attempting to handle the application. CDN are used to deliver static content, such as images, scripts, stylesheets and flash. Typical savings is 18%.

3) Add an expires header. This tells the browser that it can use the cached content until the content expires. For Apache you can use the mod_expires module. Also, use Max-Age directive. When you change a component, change the file name, this ensures that no cached content is seen by users. Add a far future Expires header to your components. Typical savings is 57%.

4) GZip components. Compress all text files - HTML, scripts, stylesheets, XML, and JSON. Typical savings is 7%.

5) Put style sheets at the top, in the head. Putting stylesheets near the bottom of the document prohibits progressive rendering in many browsers. Use <Link rel ... and not the @Import. 

6) Put the external javascripts at the bottom of the page to enable progressive rendering and greater download parallelization. Moving scripts down the page, means that more of the page is rendered for the user before the script is processed.  Also, most often only two components can be downloaded at a time from each host name. While downloading and executing a script, browsers stop other downloads. 

7) Avoid CSS expressions. CSS expressions are evaluated every time the page is rendered, resized, scrolled or even when a user moves the mouse. The CSS expression can overwrite itself as part of it's execution. See http://stevesouders.com/hpws/onetime-expressions.php

8) Make JavaScript and CSS external. This allows for caching, that is where the savings are. 

9) Reduce DNS lookups. It typically takes 20-120 miliseconds for the browser to look up the IP address for a given hostname. Reduce the number of hostnames in the web page, split between two - four hostnames and use Keep-Alive. 

10) Minify JavaScript - reduce unnecessary characters from code. Also your code can be obfuscated - remove comments, whitespace and munges the code (converts function and variable names to smaller strings). Use ShrinkSafe or DoJo Compressor. 

11) Avoid redirects. Use the Apache Alias to alias www.xxxxx.com to www.xxxxxx.com/. Or, you can use the DirectorySlash directive or the mod_rewrite. 

12) Remove duplicate scripts, they hurt performance. 

13) Configure ETags / Entity Tags - a way web servers and browsers validate cache components. This only really effects sites that are clustered; one servers component will be seen as different from another's component. This will loose the benefit of caching. Reconfigure or remove ETags.

14) Make sure your AJAX requests follow the performance guidelines, especially having a far future Expires header.

And here are a few links to tools from the book:
http:// www.gomez.com / Load & cross browser testing
http://www.getfirebug.com / development tool for FireFox
http:// developer.yahoo.com/yslow / Analyze load times of pages
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