2019-09-20 21.09.51

Performance and Working Fast (shapeof.com)

I think the reason I don't work fast anymore is because the code I write and any other actions I take for work cause ripples that effect a whole lot more people now than they did 10 years ago. I have to be conscious of this (at least I assume I do, or should be).

I often wish that software developers were criminally liable for the code they write. I have disdain for this way of working. It’s reckless.

WordPress Caching

I had some WordPress performance issues over the weekend. The website was performing so poorly that connections timed out. I traced the problem to some changes I made in the MySQL configuration. I want to spend more time learning about that so that I can find tune thing. To recover, I created a new Digital Ocean VPS and copied the default MySQL configuration to my VPS. The website performance returned.

By the time I had things squared away, my mind was soon in tweaker mode, so I made sure APCu Object Cache for PHP7 was installed, then I installed and configured the WP LCache and W3 Total Cache plugins.

There are still some issues I want to work on fixing:

  • render-blocking CSS and JavaScript
  • MySQL read performance

The Feedback Fallacy

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If you’re a human being and you’ve ever given or received feedback, read this humdinger of a Harvard Business Review article. This is the second article on feedback that I have read this week. Would love to have a dialogue about this.

My favourite part of the article is this one paragraph.

... although science has long since proven that we are colour-blind, in the business world we assume we’re clear-eyed. Deep down we don’t think we make very many errors at all. We think we’re reliable raters of others. We think we’re a source of truth. We aren’t. We’re a source of error.

Emphasis mine.