I’ve come across 3 great articles this week on best practice for building
Internet based Services.
*First* up [Simon Wilson](http://simonwillison.net/) gives a good overview
of what web orientated developers should be doing these days. As he says
“I tried to pull together all of the things I wish I’d been told before I
started building things on the Web”:
The slides are a good overview of the main areas of web engineering that have
changed in the last few years and what the current best practices are. Worth
a skim though and a subsequent Google if you find gaps in your knowledge. Simon
is a [Django](http://www.djangoproject.com/) developer so he references that
project a bit.
*Next* [Greg Linden](http://glinden.blogspot.com/) has
[a post](http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/03/designing-for-internet-scale.html) pointing
to and commenting on a [James Hamilton](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/)’s LISA
paper “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” ( [PDF here](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_Lisa.pdf) ).
I’d advise reading James’ paper first and then Greg’s comments, both are useful. I was
also looking at some other papers on [James’ site](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/) including
[this related presentation](http://research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh/TalksAndPapers/JamesRH_AmazonDev.pdf) and on Modular Data Center design. James’s
[Blog](http://perspectives.mvdirona.com) looks interesting as well.
*Finally* the Yahoo! [Exceptional Performance](http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/) people
have added another 20 rules to the existing 14 on how to speed up customer access
to you website:
NOTE: Slideshare seems to be allowing the document to be viewed but not
downloaded right now, I grabbed a copy previously ( 3 MB .ppt) if anyone wants a copy).
Currently I’m still looking at the original 14 rules for ideas, [CSS Sprites](http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites) look
especially interesting and a big potential win.
END
