me.andering – Willem van den Ende

I’ve gone ‘back’ to doing hands-on development with small a agile and small k kanban small p post-its . One of the projects I’m on is a fairly large Drupal project. While PHP and Drupal are not known for their raw performance, they do shine in delivering value quickly. Out of the box they are very easy to deploy, and if you know where to find the right modules and script installations, delivering a site rich in functionality that also looks good can be done quickly. So, what about performance? With Varnish, Pressflow and a bit of thinking we can at least make our site blisteringly fast for visitors who are not logged in.

I hadn’t expected the speedup would be this dramatic – my laptop is now serving between 1000 requests per second (most time spent in the first cache miss from drupal) and 9000 requests per second (no cache miss), where it otherwise would fail on just 1000 requests with 100 concurrent ‘users’ (also running on the same machine).

In sharing the gotchas, our configuration and some useful sources I want to give something back for the countless blog and forum posts that helped me set things up.

(more…)

Blogging, it’s not just for (US) Americans anymore

“Originally orange-white-blue, the Dutch flag first appeared in the 17th century as a symbol of the resistance to Spanish rule.” The Dutch flag – Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs

I have started preparing for XP Day France. Pascal van Cauwenberghe suggested we may need to speak French there… Right. Almost forgot about that. Minor detail.
How to practice?

I watched a bit of French television, that doesn’t help so far.

We continued our chat in French. That worked. A chat window gives me time to think and I can save difficult phrases.

It was fun, and I could keep it up longer than I expected. Until I tried to explain a problem I’m solving for a run of the Thinking for a Change workshop (possibly tomorrow at XP-NL). After some help from Pascal it ended up as:

“Comment peut-on amener les participants d’un workshop à discuter d’un problème réel et actuel qui peut être resolue avec les outils proposés lors du workshop?”

Pardon my French! In English:

“How can one get the participants of a workshop to discuss a real and actual problem that can be resolved with the tools introduced in the workshop?”

Funny. Looking back at it, the question is now phrased much more clearly than when I started (in Dutch). Rewriting in another language goes into the bag of tricks, so I can juggle my mind when rewriting, and practice languages at the same time .

If you’ve ended up here through a link from Rants and Ruminatons – I’m moving over my weblog.  Shorter domain name, and richer navigation should make it easier to find your way around. Comments lower the bar for well, comments. Rublog was nice to get started, as blogging seems to be here to stay for me, I’ve moved over to more serious software.

WordPress kicks ass around here now. Hope you’ll join me and update your links.

I’ve placed redirects for the most important pages and the feed, will add some more. I’ve also planted over a lot of the old posts, so you can browse and search the archive again. And, finally, a tag cloud, so my writings, musings and rants can meander around without me being stuck to a fixed set of categories. I hope you enjoy it.