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End-to-End JavaScript Quality Analysis
Velocity 2013 Speaker Series
The rise of single-page web applications means that front-end developers need to pay attention not only to network transport optimization, but also to rendering and computation performance. With applications written in JavaScript, the language tooling itself has not really caught up with the demand of richer, assorted performance metrics necessary in such a development workflow. Fortunately, some emerging tools are starting to show up that can serve as a stop-gap measure until the browser itself provides the native support for those metrics. I’ll be covering a number in my talk at Velocity next month, but here’s a quick sneak preview of a few.
Code coverage
One important thing that shapes the overall single-page application performance is instrumentation of the application code. The most obvious use-case is for analyzing code coverage, particularly when running unit tests and functional tests. Code that never gets executed during the testing process is an accident waiting to happen. While it is unreasonable to have 100% coverage, having no coverage data at all does not provide a lot of confidence. These days, we are seeing easy-to-use coverage tools such as Istanbul and Blanket.js become widespread, and they work seamlessly with popular test frameworks such as Jasmine, Mocha, Karma, and many others.
Complexity
Instrumented code can be leveraged to perform another type of analysis: run-time scalability. Performance is often measured by the elapsed time, e.g. how long it takes to perform a certain operation. This stopwatch approach only tells half of the story. For example, testing the performance of sorting 10 contacts in 10 ms in an address book application doesn’t tell anything about the complexity of that address book. How will it cope with 100 contacts? 1,000 contacts? Since it is not always practical to carry out a formal analysis on the application code to figure out its complexity, the workaround is to figure out the empirical run-time complexity. In this example, it can be done by instrumenting and monitoring a particular part of the sorting implementation—probably the “swap two entries” function—and watch the behavior with different input sizes.
As JavaScript applications are getting more and more complex, some steps are necessary to keep the code as readable and as understandable as possible. With a tool like JSComplexity, code complexity metrics can be obtained in static analysis steps. Even better, you can track both McCabe’s cyclomatic complexity and Halstead complexity measures of every function over time. This prevents accidental code changes that could be adding more complexity to the code. For the application dashboard or continuous integration panel, these complexity metrics can be visualized using Plato in a few easy steps.
Doug Hanks on how the MX series is changing the game
Doug Hanks on how the MX series is changing the game
Doug Hanks (@douglashanksjr) is an O’Reilly author (Juniper MX Series) and a data center architect at Juniper Networks. He is currently working on one of Juniper’s most popular devices – the MX Series. The MX is a routing device that’s optimized for delivering high-density and high-speed Layer 2 and Layer 3 Ethernet services. As you watch the video interview embedded in this post, the data is more than likely being transmitted across the Juniper MX.
We recently sat down to discuss the MX Series and the opportunities it presents. Highlights from our conversation include:
- MX is one of Juniper’s best-selling platforms [Discussed at the 0:32 mark].
- Learn if the MX can help you [Discussed at the 1:00 mark].
- What you need to know before using the MX [Discussed at the 6:40 mark].
- What’s next for Juniper [Discussed at the 9:39 mark].
You can view the entire interview in the following video.
Kate Matsudaira: If You Don’t Understand People, You Don’t Understand Ops
Velocity 2013 Speaker Series
While automation is clearly making everyone’s lives who work in Operations much better, startup founder Kate Matsudaira (@katemats) acknowledges that “No one ever does their work in a vaccum.” You can try as much as possible to Automate All The Things, but you can’t automate trust. And trust is key to a healthy, thriving operations team (and your own professional growth, too).
In this interview, Kate discusses some of the things she’ll be talking about at Velocity next month. Key highlights include:
- The word “people” is pretty broad. What aspects of working with people should operations teams care about? [Discussed at 1:32]
- Ultimately, you depend on the people around you to help get work done, especially when you need to get funding, be it externally for a startup, or internally for an infrastructure or refactoring project. The more people trust you, the more likely that is to happen. [Discussed at 3:17]
- Cultural change takes leadership, but that leadership doesn’t have to come from the top. [Discussed at 5:00]
- You can be ridiculously technically competent, but if you can’t communicate well, it hinders your success in the long run. [Discussed at 5:40]
You can view the entire interview here:
This is one of a series of posts related to the upcoming Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, CA (June 18-20). We’ll be highlighting speakers in a variety of ways, from video and email interviews to posts by the speakers themselves.
Sascha Bates on Configuration Management: It’s Not about the Tool
Velocity 2013 speaker series
“Puppet and Chef are completely different, and yet exactly the same,” admits Sascha Bates (@sascha_d). In this interview about her talk at the upcoming Velocity Conference, she discusses common pitfalls that people can avoid when getting started with configuration management. And here’s a hint: it isn’t about which tool you choose.
After years in the trenches helping a variety of organizations implement Chef, Sascha learned (often the hard way) a few critical things that she’ll share in her talk. Key points from our discussion include:
- When getting started with configuration management, people often fret over which tool they use, when they should be thinking more about the overall integration with their particular system. [Discussed at the 0:50 mark.]
- Both Chef and Puppet have the concept of a package manager, and if you’re not setting that up properly, things can spiral out of control quickly. [Discussed at the 1:25 mark.]
- Her top configuration management anti-patterns. [Discussed at the 2:43 mark.]
- What superpower someone will have after attending her talk. [Discussed at the 3:55 mark.]
Watch the whole interview here:
This is the first in a series of posts related to the upcoming Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, CA (June 18-20). We’ll be highlighting speakers in a variety of ways, from video and email interviews to posts by the speakers themselves.
Velocity Report: Building a DevOps Culture
DevOps is as much about culture as it is about tools.
Operations professionals live in a wind tunnel. If you can imagine one of those game show glass boxes, where a contestant stands inside, the door shuts, and money blows around in a whirlwind, you’ve got a good idea of what Operations feels like much of the time. While you’re trying to grab one technology, another has forced itself across your eyes demanding attention.
The incredible growth of an industry that didn’t really even exist fifteen years ago has provided us with endless opportunity and innovations. It’s also required us to be on the forefront of many new technologies in a way other professions aren’t. The constant drive towards the next technology, the next platform, and the next idea has stratified our organizations, creating specializations in areas like networking, storage, security, data sciences, and a myriad of other functions that challenge our ability to work with our colleagues as a cohesive team.
Six themes from Velocity Europe
Cultural shifts and handling large-scale growth among the emerging trends in the WPO and DevOps communities
By Steve Souders and John Allspaw
More than 700 performance and operations engineers were in London last week for Velocity Europe 2012. Below, Velocity co-chairs Steve Souders and John Allspaw note high-level themes from across the various tracks (especially the hallway track) that are emerging for the WPO and DevOps communities.
Performance themes from Steve Souders
I was in awe of the speaker and exhibitor lineup going into Velocity Europe. It was filled with knowledgeable gurus and industry leaders. As Velocity Europe unfolded a few themes kept recurring, and I wanted to share those with you.
Performance matters more — The places and ways that web performance matters keeps growing. The talks at Velocity covered desktop, mobile (native, web, and hybrid), tablet, TV, DSL, cable, FiOS, 3G, 4G, LTE, and WiMAX across social, financial, ecommerce, media, games, sports, video, search, analytics, advertising, and enterprise. Although all of the speakers were technical, they talked about how the focus on performance extends to other departments in their companies as well as the impact performance has on their users. Web performance has permeated all aspects of the web and has become a primary focus for web companies. Read more…
Faster and stronger: Looking back on Velocity 2012
Abstraction problems, resilience engineering and outliers among Velocity's big themes.
Mike Loukides highlights talks from Velocity 2012, including: Bryan McQuade on the importance of understanding the full stack, Dr. Richard Cook on failures and complex systems, Mike Christian on redundant data centers, and John Rauser on the value of outliers.
Velocity Profile: Schlomo Schapiro
Web ops and performance questions with Schlomo Schapiro.
A profile of web operations and performance expert Schlomo Schapiro, systems architect and open source evangelist at ImmobilienScout24.
A crazy awesome gaming infrastructure
Sarah Novotny on building high-performance gaming platforms.
How do you bridge the gap between IT and business while building a gaming infrastructure that scales? Sarah Novotny addresses that question in this Velocity podcast.
Velocity Profile: Kate Matsudaira
Web ops and performance questions with Kate Matsudaira.
A profile of web operations and performance expert Kate Matsudaira, vice president of engineering at Decide.com.
