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Blogs ยป Archive for August 7th, 2007
OSCON 2007: Open Design, Not by Committee
Ted Leung is a Senior Engineer at OSAF, and blogs at Ted Leung On The Air
Mimi Yin is a UI Designer at OSAF
(Disclaimer: I work at OSAF on the Web UI for Chandler Server.) This talk centered on the open design process used by OSAF in developing both the Chandler Desktop client, and the Chandler Server Web UI, and how open design differs from open development.
Open design is participatory, but mediated — i.e., decisions are made within the context of community discussion and participation, but with a specific responsible party for decisions to avoid devolving into design-by-committee.
Specific topics included:
- The thought processes of developers versus designers — developers think in terms of features and specs, designers think more holistically.
- How to do design in a distributed, participatory environment — use of tools such as wiki and mailing list.
- How to judge the relative merits of design proposals based on specific goals, requirements — i.e, use cases.
- Defining the ‘target user.’
- How to build a community of contributors to the design process — what is the equivalent of a ‘commiter’ in the open design process?
The talk concluded by going over next steps for cultivating an open-design community — by making objectives clear, getting people to …
OSCON 2007: High Performance Web Pages
Steve Souders is Chief Performance Yahoo at Yahoo.
Talk focused on optimizing performance of client-side code, which — surprisingly — makes up 80-90% or more of the user wait time.
Steve ran quickly through 13 basic rules for high-performance Web sites:
- Make Fewer HTTP Requests
- Use a Content Delivery Network
- Add an Expires Header
- Gzip Components
- Put CSS at the Top
- Move Scripts to the Bottom
- Avoid CSS Expressions
- Make JavaScript and CSS External
- Reduce DNS Lookups
- Minify JavaScript
- Avoid Redirects
- Remove Duplicate Scripts
- Configure ETags
Articles on techniques for all these rules are available online at Exceptional Performance on the Yahoo Developer Network.
Steve also introduced the YSlow add-on for Firefox, that integrates with Firebug to analyze your pages according to the 13 rules and help you optimize your pages’ performance.
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