Some thought about Web performance

Web performance sounds very trivial to me until last week. The workshop yesterday is quite impressive and easy to understand. Though some of the techniques are a bit too high-end to us to apply for the final project. I got the basic knowledge about why we want to improve web performance and how we can avoid making bad User Experience.

If an web app is not popular at all, no one cares about how fast it is. But if it's really popular, then people will have higher requirements on it. And it also saves a lot of money. As I'm just a beginner of building web apps, I rarely considered about the web performance before. That results in a lot of waste in resources, rubbish can be found here and there in the codes. The page looks fine, but the errors hidden behind the page slow down the loading process. And the users will be left there looking at the blank page without anything to do. I can understand that people are lazy and impatient when browsing web pages, that's why they usually open several tabs at the same time. Now the users have so many options that they won't wait for your page to be loaded. If they lose their patience, they just close the page and open another one, there is always a alternate way.

The workshop also remind me of something else besides the web performance. As henry said ,"if there are a hundred thousand users who use your app, then saving 1 second for each user means you save a day accumulatively. It sounds amazing, but I thought it is not so amazing for me. Because there are so many other staffs are consuming my time, and that is much more than the 1 second. Most of the waste of time are caused by the so called explosion of information. I think most people who are passive in life are drowned in the information like me. If we passively receive the information,  it will result in a lot of time wasted. So I must change my habit and live more actively.

My browser crashed just now. Thank god, the blogger saves my draft regularly. This is also an example of good User Experience.It saves us much time and make life easier. Ten years ago if we would lost some data while processing, most will take it as the fault of their carelessness. But nowadays that will be a fault of the application or system. We should be more careful doing our final projects now, users are more critical than in the past.

Google Wave Assignment Review

It has been too late to write about GW assignment already. But never mind, I'll just try to memorize and summarize some important things those I've learned during the assignment.

At first the challenge is its conflicts with the happy chinese new year, the cny is abrupt to the module schedule. It ends up I neither had a good holiday nor learned much in wave api. That is a common mistake I've been always  making. Maybe I should learn to focus on things more so that I don't get disturbed by other things.

The second thing I learned from the assignment is that google is really becoming a giant in the software world. Maybe not only software, we are also having Gphones in our life now. And so many amazing web services are provided by google. As a beginner of gmail user, I'm trying google doc, google code,google app engine as well. I'm really pleased to have so many userful services which I have missed for the past time. Well, luckily now I can proudly to say that I'm the first groups of people who are using googlewave. I think this product is very promising. The extensible widgets make it so much usability and fun. And the powerful API is the basic reason why the widgets can be versatile. Now giant google is still growing fast. I just can't wait to see how it will change our life in future.

The last thing is that I have to admit that I really contribute little in the whole assignment. Now I look back at it, I felt I lost some chance to learn new things. I should have not put limit to my self, I should keep reminding myself that I can do "that". I've received the email recently about google summer of code. It's a pity that I am not able to take it this holiday. But I'm sure I will strive for the next chance.

Lots of things to achieve and strive for, that's what university should be like.

Late blogging: Case Study 2: Team Dynamics

After reading the whole story of VC team, I am very sorry for the unexpected end. At first I thought the team very promising. They have talented people, good designer, experienced game developers. Though there is a lack of programmers, it's not big problem. If there is a problem, that may be the underestimation of technical difficulties of some implementations. And  for a team with such a big ambition, the school time is of course not enough for them to implement it. So their decision to extend to the vacation time is sensible. But it also leads the problem of commitment. The problem appears to be the inconvenience of the meeting and some other individual issues. I think the main reason for the lack of commitment is the lack of stress and wearing down passion. It's very common for people to slack when there is no enough stress. So to gain the power to do something difficult, we need great passions. For the team, I think they are a bit too ambitious at the first time,that may be the reason why they lost the confidence and passion after a few months' struggling. Fortunately, their great effort put on the project are not in vain. They gained experience, friendship,and some technology.

 To learn from the case. I have the following things in mind:

Usually, we are not lucky enough to get the best configuration of a team with four people. So we have to optimize the existing manpowers. Unlike the VC team, our team lacks designer. That may be a big problem. Even we get some help from our friends, we can't ensure their full commitment. Especially that our project is a game, so the graphic is a main aspect which attracts users. So we have to either find some designer who can commit fully with us, or make our game concise and strategical. If the VC team had predicted the difficulty of dealing  with all those real-time and flash thing, they may rethink their design. I think a good facebook game don't have to be real-time. It depends on both the teams programming strength. So with so many artists and experienced game designers, they have the ability to design some attracting game even with just some texts and images.

And about the commitment. This may be the hardest part. At this time, all project dues, mid terms, experiments are coming one by one. We are waken up with the message that we have some other modules to learn other than 3216. And the passion seems die down a bit after the first two projects. That is the time to make the difficult choice. But do we really have choices? It's already decided when we decided to take the module. So we should just try to focus on everything and keep stressed till the end of the sem. And no one know what will happen after that, maybe we will be extremely successful and start a new journey or we just go back to normal life without success. Anyway we learned a lot in the process, and also from those talented people we met. Anyway I hope there will be no regrets left and the vacation should be a new start.