Willy Dobbe - english

Presentation of ProjectPAAS held at DrupalJam 2013

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:42:47 +0000

Projectpaas drupaljam 2013 rotterdam from bert boerland

The presentation of held at the DrupalJam.

A service that give a detailed opinionated report on how to improve the service of your Drupal website.

There is no box, do not try to think out of it :-)

Tue, 07 May 2013 17:06:39 +0000

There is no box. Do not try to think out of it...

Bert Boerland Bold

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:34:04 +0000

Just uploading ONE single image to a webservce and ending up with a 3D model of the person. No hair though..

SFO is a giant squid

Wed, 01 May 2013 09:55:00 +0000

Every now and then you hear some news about or see some pictures of "Giant Squids".

What about the San Fransico Airport?

Grotere kaart weergeven

Aart is the Dark Knight (aka Batman)

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 18:35:54 +0000

Aart is Batman.

ProjectPAAS

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:53:41 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we launched the website of a service we have been working on hard for over half a year. The project started as a SAAS about performance and hence the internal project name was “ProjectPAAS”. As it goes with internal project names, it became the name of the service it self.

12 seconds start now

I still have problems explaining what the service is doing in an elevator pitch. But basicaly one installs a module on a to be tested staging site from d.o with the funky URL /project/paas, configures the service on the portal of projectpaas.com and then wait an hour or two. We start a service to measure your site from the outside and from the inside, analyse the data, make a report and when you check your mail you get an in depth report on all the elements of the chain that are relevant to the performance of the website.

We measure from one or more selectable (EC2) locations in the world with over 150 metrics and we only report on real data, no yslow wisdom. We know what influence speed, we see how it is configured at your site (with the module or from the outisde) and we simulate to find the the optimal value would be for your use case.

The cliché for example that one needs parallel download (images[1-4].example.com) to bypass the maximumum connection a browser can have to a host, is just that, a cliché. When one takes DNS lookup,TCP slow start and the sliding window in to account, for certain usecase, having images[x].example.com might actually be slower. So we are opinionated, we measure, we analyse, we report, you gain speed.

Easteregg

I really like retro future so we used this for a theme around the site and facebook. But since easter (Dutch "pasen" is coming up,
do check the projectpaas.com website, find the easteregg and twitter about it. :-)

This posting isn't as much about the service of ProjectPAAS as it is about why we made the service. To share our experience and to get feedback from you. There are two reasons we made it, one is internally driven and one is externally.

The internal reason is that we have been building some of the most visited sites and webapps in Drupal in the Netherlands. So after some time we got good at performance, we understood what to do and what not to do for the complete stack of elements that define speed, HTML, CSS, Linux, Apache, MySQL and yes, Drupal. Word got out that we were good and siteowners that have been building their site at another company, came to us for advice on how to get more speed in their site.
Once we had done a dozen of these reports, we wanted to make the reports more easily accessible for the site owners and website builders. This is part of why westarted the Performance Reporting

Land here

The external reason might be more interesting for you. We made the SAAS because we think that the CMS landscape will change and our business will change.

The landscape will change. 10 years ago everybody had his/her own CMS, there were more CMS-es then websites it seemed. 5 yeas ago it was clear who were going to be the winners in the consolidation, 80% of the proprietary "solutions" were gone and open source was no longer a dirty word in enterprises. Within the open CMS-es, the global top 5 was visible though especially in Europe there were still many local open source CMS-es. This consolidation perse was good open source and especially for Drupal shops.

However, the market won't stop here. Most of the Drupal websites are not complex, they don't have any connections to backend systems, less than 10k pageviews per day and are relatively expensive to build and most of all expensive to maintain. Here is the business case for open source SAAS, solutions based on open source software like Aqcuia and Wordpress.com offer. These solutions with standard modules and a customisable template is good enough right now for 20% of the Drupal sites out there and will cost a fraction of what building it "by hand" will cost.

The users of these open source SAAS hosting solutions will only grow. Good for the parties offering these services, bad for the Drupal shops that have been building relatively simple portfolio sites. By itself, this trend might have a big impact those coding Drupal core, modules or working in for example the security team. This is not meant in a bad way, but with most of the sites going towards a smaler group of SAAS companies, the number of "independent" individuals adding to core or writing modules might actually get lower, they might have another itch. It will be very interesting to see how this will develop, I might be completely wrong here.

Performance takes time

Traditionally most Drupal shops do projects, do maintenance and do consulting. Some have found a nice niche, a place geographically apart, a specific vertical or a certain service like migration from another CMS. However, most Drupal shops build relatively simple websites for SOHO plus. I know there are many shops that work for high end enterprises. But not all the 280.000 Drupal sites fit in the Alexa top 100.000. So I do think that if you are a Drupal shop, you have to find your sweet spot the next couple of month. On the one hand we have operational excellence (a SAAS to host sites like gardens or a service like ProjectPAAS itself) and on the other hand customer intimacy (the complex sites with lots of integration with backend systems and complex workflow). There might be space between these two, but the portfolio site area will get very crowded and Drupal will not be the best tool to serve this in my opinion. This is part of the reason why we build our first SAAS around a product we understand and is close to our core business. We are already planning next services that might still be build in Drupal but will target a broader audience.

For the moment, if you are intersted in our product, dont be shy and talk to us on twitter or faces us. Potential resellers or users are welcome to fill out our form. We really do hope that our product can help you build faster websites and thereby push Drupal even more ahead of the curve.

get your ticket to the Frontendunited Event in London now

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 19:05:28 +0000

A small plug, if you want to attend the Drupal event about design, frontend development and usability, be sure to take a look at frontendunited.org, London, April 13-14. I do think there are some of the best speakers lined up both from within our community and related communities, for example Christian Heilmann. The venue must be the coolest one ever to house so many Drupalistas. So think about ordering a ticket (free hugs from mortendk when you select community sponsorship) or become a sponsor and get some free tickets.

Order now and win a pony.

Frontend United, From Amsterdam to London

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 15:46:14 +0000

Last year, I was one of the coorganizers of Frontend United In Amsterdam, The Netherlands. I have organized dozen of events, DrupalCons, DrupalJams, DrupalCamps totaling a dozen of events. The best and most funny to organize of them all however was the Frontend United conference with good friends Jesper, Marek, Morten, Philippe and angel Isabelle. The weekly conference calls quickly became a selfhelp group and the best comedy channel available.

The fun we had organizing the event, clearly payed off and turned the event in to the best event I ever attended. Mostly because Fronten United is different. We have some rules to live by and these rules help us organize it and give the best value possible to the attendees. In fact, we try to be for Drupal what TED is for technology! Our rules are simple

Outside in, not inside out
Attendees first, not the sponsors (or mobile :-)
Grow horizontally, not vertically
Maximum value for attendees
Nerds rule

These are simple rules, resulting in a great conference. Outside in means we will look at technology, design. The unimportant stuff and then but only then Drupal. We look at speakers who are architects, painters, people whose actions or ideas are completely irrelevant for Drupals community in the narrow sense but if mapped on our community, code or license of great influence. We value attendees above sponsors. We do *heart* our sponsors, they are the best. But in the end the sponsors and the organizers work for the attendees, not the other way around. We will never do a sponsored talk, an opening by a sponsor or a case-study, mixing content and sponsors is the best way to kill a brand in our opinion. We believe in growth, but not that a number like “attendees” has anything to do with growth. We aim at 250 people max per conference and grow in quality from there. We will never have 2.000 attendees but will have the best sessions available. As for the nerds part, the group photo was taken at 13:37 time.

We succeed in all of these rules last year. All but one. Despite the fact that one sponsor went belly up and did not pay our fiscal agency, the Drupal Association (thanks!), we still made money. And thereby did not give the maximum value for our attendees.

Or did we? If you look at this blog by friend Baris Frontend-United was awesome or at the blog of the king it looks we succeeed in givin the attendees the best con ever! It was great to hear jan Willem Tulp talk about data visualization and the story of how Jeroen Wijering sold his a license for his video player to YouTube for $25 is still great to hear. No matter what your question was (“$25 per server? Client? Month?”) his answer would be $25.

Here are some snapshots of the money we made with sales and the hat-round, the venue “Pakhuis de Zwijger”, the banner with the sponsors, the excellent t-shirt with the infamous astronaut and the drinking venue with the Druplicon as a logo.

So far for 2012. On with 2013. With the help of a great all-female team in the UK, we are pulling the best Drupal conference of once again, backed by the Drupal Association (thanks), in London, 13 and 14 of April, in Cargo. Ticket sales will start shortly, great keynote speakers are already lined up but we need you as a speaker and as a sponsor! So please earmark the date in your agenda, think about an inspiring talk Frontend related and download the attached sponsor brochure. And mail we if you are interested in sponsoring, bert AT boerland DOT com.

Now lets rock London!

Smart trashcan

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 15:27:23 +0000

A geek that cant throw, a 3D printer, some code, some batteries, a kinect and a trashcan.. Make a great combination, watch this:

A great video with Kinect , ni-mate and blender

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 19:50:23 +0000

A great arty video using Kinect and raytracing

Kinect Project /// I Dieci from Alkanoids on Vimeo.

It is using the opensource Kinect drivers I have been using, ni-mate (a Kinect to 3d rending engine) and the engine blender.

More information including a "making of" onbehance.com

Great art of Willy Verginer

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:57:54 +0000

Great art. Just great. See this work of Willy Verginer over at formfiftyfive

Willy's own site is showing of some great work of him as well, see verginer.com

Pong access.log with logstalgia

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:26:57 +0000

Let your webservers accesslog be the source of a game of pong :-)

If you are a brew OSX user, a oneliner to install :-)

see logstalgia

Dear Google, please read my useragent

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 16:05:05 +0000

Everytime you surf towards a website, you send a lot of information about you towards that site. Your IP address and the browser you are using for example with the user agent string. Smart banners -independent of behavioral targeting with tracking cookies- is possible with this. But please google, when I visit gmail in a chrome browser, do not ask me to download chrome. And when I use a Mac, dont ask to me to use the MSI format for that.

Want to know what information you send and how unique you are for a website without using cookies? Visit eff's fingerprinting site.

Prediction for Drupal in 2013

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 21:32:56 +0000

Ever since node 4877 in 2003 we have a “prediction” post up on drupal.org where Drupal coder and users can share their vision on what will happen the year ahead with their beloved tool. Ever? Well, we skipped last year on drupal.org. so we can not look back to the predictions you made last year on this site.

But that should not stop you to make new some new predictions. And you welcome to do so in the comments on the posting on d.o.

Will parts of Drupal end up in another CMS or framework? Will “WSCCI first” be the slogan? Or will the consolidation in the CMS landscape and the trend to leave our small island make new bridges towards other PHP projects or even make a new Pangaea, beyond PHP and the web? Will Drupal be the answer in Jeopardy on the question “what is the best CMS?”. Time will tell. Or you.. In the comments on the prediction 2013 posting.

Kinect Dance with curtain

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:00:26 +0000

Too bad there is not much information online about how they build this... Cool technology though, lame dancing :-)