May 2013
1 post
3 tags
BrowserMob Proxy 2.0 beta 8 released!
It’s been a few months and it was pretty obvious a new release of BrowserMob Proxy was in order. If you’re impatient, you can get it here and skip this announcement.
The most important thing to note is that I’ve forked the project back in to my personal Github repository. In addition, the website has been moved to bmp.lightbody.net. I did this simply because I no longer work at...
July 2012
1 post
Capturing errors in the end user experience
This year I again had the privilege of delivering a keynote during the Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, CA. Last year I shared my experiences, lessons learned, and cloud services I depended on during the lifetime of BrowserMob - from inception to acquisition (video here).
This year I spent my time on stage discussing the various types of tools DevOps people depend on to maximize performance,...
February 2012
1 post
10 Tips For Achieving Email Bliss
Over the last few years I’ve learned that the best way to manage my inbox was to follow the Inbox Zero technique, widely advocated by Merlin Mann. As stated on the official website, it’s not about literally having zero items in your inbox (though I do get there), but rather how much of your brainpower is dedicated towards managing your email.
Since I’ve been personally able to...
November 2011
3 posts
A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs →
A touching from Mona Simpson.
October 2011
24 posts
Where the heck has Patrick been?
A couple weeks ago, I started blogging again after a hiatus over over two years - my last post was in July 2009. I figured before I got too carried away with any more activity, it might be worth a quick recap of where the heck I’ve been!
Back in November 2008 I announced my second startup, BrowserMob. My goal was to re-invent the world of website load testing by utilizing real browsers (and...
From Steve Jobs: Biography: "I'm going to destroy... →
I love Steve and I love Apple. But it is annoying to see reports of Steve and others claim that Android ripped off the iPhone but few reports of the reverse. The new iOS 5 notifications are awesome. They also are a total copy of Android’s. It goes both ways.
Read the original story here: From Steve Jobs’ Biography: “I’m going to destroy Android” (shared from Google...
Newsflash: people still buy software
I don’t know the exact timing, but somewhere between 2000 and 2007, much of the Silicon Valley lost interest in the idea that a business could build software and that people would buy it. Sure, plenty of startups still went about doing the enterprise software thing - companies I worked for like Jive and Spoke Software.
But the excitement around those kinds of companies pretty much dried up...
Amazon Lets You Spin Up A Supercomputer Cluster →
We (BrowserMob) routinely launch thousands of instances on Amazon EC2 every day. Back in 2008 when I started the company, my bet was that as big as EC2 was then, it was only going to get bigger and cheaper. And boy did it! Today we’re one of Amazon’s largest users, in terms of peak concurrent instances/CPU cores. We don’t quite do the 30K CPU cores that is referenced in this...
Predator-Inspired Ammo Backpack Cobbled Together... →
Read the original story here: Predator-Inspired Ammo Backpack Cobbled Together By Soldiers In Afghanistan (shared from Google reader).
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But...”
– Steve Jobs
HALL.com Raises $580K From Founder’s Collective... →
I’ve had the pleasure of watching Brett go through several iterations on his idea and I he’s going to do great with Hall.com. Despite the “big” players in the space like Jive (my old employer), Yammer, and Salesforce, there is still plenty of room for innovation and disruption in group collaboration, including in the enterprise. It doesn’t hurt that his investors...
Chronon 2.0 Offers Post Execution Logging →
I’ve seen Chronon and it’s really cool technology. Hoping to try it out on BrowserMob soon!
Read the original story here: Chronon 2.0 Offers Post Execution Logging (shared from Google reader).
frontend SPOF survey →
Pat Meenan continues to offer up simple and practical advice for anyone looking to build a professional, high performing website. Here he provides a fantastic example of how a simple thing like Twitter being offline can have disastrous effects on your own website.
Read the original story here: frontend SPOF survey (shared from Google reader).
WSJ Gets Personal With Gravity →
Really glad to see that people are still trying to figure out how to effectively personalize news. A few years back I worked on a startup/side project called mioNews. It never quite got full lift off but the intent was to combine your social graph, your reading habits, and your reason feedback (like/dislike) and be able to deliver the top X stories you should read today. I still think this is a...
1 tag
The tribesman who Facebook friended me
I just read a really interesting story about a tribesman from Papua New Guinea, whose tribe just recently discovered that feathers make arrows fly better, re-connecting with an old friend over Facebook. The author asks:
Should we mourn the passing of a phase in our history when bands of human minds still lived in isolation, or rejoice that we are finally all on the same page?
My answer: we...
1 tag
Steve Jobs Sports Analogy
My friend Arin (a fellow entrepreneur) and I were talking the other day and as we were discussing Steve Jobs’ death and trying to understand why it was affecting us so much more than a regular iPhone/iPad/iPod/Mac owner, he said something that really struck a chord with me:
Steve Jobs is like Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson or any other mega super star: he made those in his field want...
Google Axes More Services: Jaiku, Buzz, Code... →
Good to see Google focussing and saying “no” to distractions. This is something Apple has been excellent at in the last decade and something I try to apply to my own career as much as possible.
Read the original story here: Google Axes More Services: Jaiku, Buzz, Code Search & More (shared from Google reader).
NeuStar To Acquire On-Demand Customer Insight... →
Awesome to see Neustar, the company that I sold BrowserMob to, on TechCrunch! And this is the same day I started seeing commercials for UltraViolet movies - a good day for Neustar indeed!
NeuStar, the company that specializes in providing data insights and intelligence for web, telecommunications, entertainment, advertising and marketing companies, today announced that it has acquired...
Steve Jobs, Superman →
Chris Dixon (via Mike Arrington) declares that great men (supermen!) can make a great company. I agree. I think that the world lost possible THE Superman if technology last week when Steve Jobs died.
What happens to Apple now that Steve Jobs is gone? Check out this 2009 post from Chris Dixon that compares Apple and Steve Jobs to Sony and Akio Morita titled MAN AND SUPERMAN.
Akio was famous...
Whew! Server Migrated
I just finished migrating lightbody.net (including the Wordpress installation from my old blog) over to a t1.micro instance that is part of the AWS free tier. I’m also using Route 53 to host DNS, so I guess that means I’m 100% in the cloud for my own domain now.
Going forward I hope to never have to host my own website unless it’s software I personally built. Things like Tumblr...
You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better →
Wow, surprised Ryan Dahl’s rant about Node (which is worth a read, btw) actually ended up all the way on TechCrunch!
“I hate almost all software. It’s unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer … you don’t understand how fucked the whole thing is,” rants Ryan Dahl, the much- (and rightly-) lauded creator of Node.js. “It really, truly, is all crap. And it’s so much worse than anybody...
Why Amazon is crushing it
My wife and I decided to try out Amazon Prime (1 month free trial) because we have a three-week-old at home and need diapers, wipes, etc.
Wow. Combined with 1 Click it is scary addictive.
But even crazier is that I’m at Babies R Us right now and looking at a Baby Bjorn Sling for $119.
Using the Amazon app on my phone I scanned the barcode and found that they had it for $99. With one...
Raphael 2.0 Released →
A great JavaScript canvas library just got better!
An alternative to Rhino? →
We use Rhino at BrowserMob and WebMetrics heavily - the biggest reason is that when you turn on interpreted mode you can do some really nice guarding against potential abuse by end-users (ex: infinite loops, infinite stack depth, long running programs, memory hogging, class access restrictions, etc).
I’ll be curious to see if these capabilities are still possible with invokedynamic,...
