Seven Seconds

Thursday, December 21, 2006

Simile...Cooler then like or as

It has been quite some time since I put in my first blog entry. Caroline was born and there went all of my free time.

Today I spent some time with an interesting colleague from a Canadian Performance Management and Monitoring company called Coradiant. He introduced me to a really neat web site called Simile from the labs at MIT. This was a timely find as I've been spending much of my time teaching my staff about the concepts of time phased occurences within software applications and how they directly correlate performance. If you haven't checked it out, I recommend that you do.

I've also decided that now might be the best time for my team to adopt the Apdex scale for a better understanding of response time performance. In the past I have been hesitant to adopt an all-or-nothing approach to performance analysis. After some deep deliberation, I realized that my view into performance is somewhat complex and could be deeply simplified.

I will write more later...just wanted to talk about the three links above...

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Into the World...Here She Comes

My daughter Caroline, I’m proud to say, will be born in less then 3 days. It's been quite an anguishing nine plus months waiting for her arrival. But what's three days in the scheme of things? Well three days is 72 hours...it's 4,320 minutes...most importantly it's 259,200 seconds. By the time you finish this blog, it will be 259,140 seconds until she arrives.

My wife and I are what you would call impatient people. We hate surprises and most of all we hate to wait longer then the prescribed waiting period for whatever given context we are waiting on. So imagine the pain and frustration we have gone through in waiting for our daughter.

Did you notice I not only told you we are expecting a daughter, but that her name will be Caroline? Well, this is part of our impatience mantra. We found out that Caroline was a girl the first chance we had a legitimate sonogram. We had names picked out well in advance. I believe my wife had narrowed down the list to Caroline and Not Caroline if it was a boy weeks leading up to the sonogram.

We announced her name to the world as soon as we were sure it was a girl. I believed we announced her name so that I personally could get her name straight before she arrived. My wife, Jenny, announced her name boastfully so that no other expecting mothers would claim the name before Caroline's birth.

Seven-seconds is my view into the world of software performance from the eyes of an impatient pragmatist. I have to confess that I am a practicing software performance engineer for a commercial software company. I've been a practicing perfeng for about eight years and vigilant about software performance for roughly ten plus years.

I believe all things software should take less then seven seconds. I'm not foolish in my thoughts, as I am well aware that some things just take longer. What I am really talking about is response time perception by an individual. Seven seconds is a long time. Counting to seven brings us that much closer to Caroline's arrival. Only 259,147 seconds to go.