ProjectX Blog

Steve Sounders has put up the test for his stanford class on website optimisation.

There are some really challenging questions in there.

Why were ETags introduced in HTTP/1.1?
What are four techniques for reducing cookie weight?
List five techniques for making selector matching faster.
Why do ETags (with the default Apache and IIS syntax) degrade performance with regard
to proxy caching?

Kudos to Steve for pushing the boundaries of our field. Its time that optimisation was baked in by default and every web developer knew the fundamentals! That starts by teaching the students of the future.

ProjectX is heavily involved with Summer of Code and we’ve just release a number of videos on blip tv

The videos are featuring:
John Clegg – Ready, Set Code
Peter Watling – Introduction to iPhone development
Douglas Talbot – Introduction to Agile Programming
Nat Torkington – Somthing I wish people had told me…

Xlinks is a collection of interesting links as discovered by the ProjectX team.

Streetview arrives in NZ
Added on 12/02/2008 at 08:04AM
How Google’s ear hears
Added on 12/01/2008 at 07:04PM
Super happy dev house is on this week
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:54PM

Life magzine photo archive on Google
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:47PM

A more useful 404
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:42PM

The size of Africa
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:42PM

The commoditisation of massive data analysis
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:40PM

Splitting up founders pie
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:35PM

Tech crunchs new search engine powered by Yahoo Boss
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:32PM

Warren Buffet – 10 ways to get rich
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:30PM

NY Times visualisation lab
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:28PM

Mapping the worlds supercomputers
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:25PM

Easing the path from design to development
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:24PM

Amazon’s cloudfront – global load balancing
Added on 12/01/2008 at 06:23PM

Silicon Welly HQ
Added on 11/29/2008 at 04:12PM

Meer Meer – Cross browser testing through one browser
Added on 11/26/2008 at 08:36AM

Billionaire lessons from Malcolm Gladwell
Added on 11/20/2008 at 09:05AM

The Food Miles Mistake – Saving the planet by eating New Zealand apples
Added on 11/20/2008 at 09:00AM

Web Sequence Diagrams – basic UML: Awesome – Hat tip to David Preece
Added on 11/18/2008 at 02:52PM

WPA-TKIP broken almost
Added on 11/15/2008 at 11:39PM

iPhone top phone in US 3rd quarter 2008
Added on 11/12/2008 at 12:25AM

Here’s  five reasons on why Smaps rocked our world –

1. Smaps was designed to be simple and intuitive.
2. Smaps is blazzingly fast. We worked really really hard at making the predictive search fast and it paid off.
3. Smaps was built to scale. The site has been running off only a few servers and managed to handle peak traffic of over 65K users in one day. (This happened on the day Smaps was mentioned in the Trade Me newsletter.)
4. Smaps was built on an open source stack – ruby on rails, postgres, apache / lighttpd running on windows and later ubuntu.
5. Trade Me backed a small team – ProjectX and we prove together could build world class technology from Wellington.