How to speed up WordPress Apache using Batcache Multisite and Memcache on CentOS
I run a small WordPress network on an Amazon Micro Instance and this means that I need to stay on top of caching. Having had a look around at a lot of different options I decided that I would use Batcache and Memcache to provide me with in memory caching should one of my posts […]
Heidi Rozen: It’s the business model, stupid
Heidi Rozen gave a great talk at the DMGT Technology Summer School simply titled “Failure”. A Silicon Valley Alumni she has started companies, worked for Apple under Steve Jobs and now is involved in Venture Capital so she had her fair share of stories. I was really impressed with her perspective on development and seemed […]
Wendy Lea from Get Satisfaction on Customer Driven Development
Wendy Lea the CEO of Get Satisfaction gave a presentation at the DMGT Technology Summer School on “The voice of the customer”. There were some great points on how they have infused passion for their customers into a customer driven development process. As their business is based completely on capturing customer feedback it was great […]
Strategic Perspectives from Bill Raduchel
I had the pleasure of spending some time at the DMGT Technology Summer School with Bill Raduchel. He had a long and interesting career before joining DMGT as a technology advisor to the board. I managed to capture some of his advice below and a couple of quotes which resonated well with me. “Heroism is an […]
How Metro built a metrics driven product development process
I have spent the last three years at Metro constantly tweaking our development process to fit our environment and teams maturity. At the same time the product development process had remained reasonably unchanged. Someone comes up with an idea we all have a debate about how good/bad we think it will be and someones opinion […]
How to setup an AWS EC2 instance to reduce WordPress hacker attacks
WordPress hacker attacks have been on the rise this year and although I haven’t been hacked (touch wood) they have managed to overload my site on a number of occasions. I have been on a quest to stop them getting in and also to reduce the instances of their repeated entry attempts taking it down. […]
22 tips for managing successful Agile projects
In the past year I have run two large successful agile projects that have delivered software using the Scrum methodology to build a minimum viable product (MVP) and then transitioned to Kanban once they have gone live. The first one was the Metro.co.uk responsive redesign and CMS migration which was delivered on time and under budget. […]
Vrsus: “The future of real time voting” – DMGT Hackathon 2013
About six months ago I was sitting in a CTO meeting across DMGT and they were trying to come up with ways that we could improve collaboration across the group. After a few suggestions around wiki based API pages I came up with the idea to run a Hackathon. In my experience the best […]
Changing the Paradigm with Swipe
I was very fortunate to attend the 2013 WordPress VIP Developer conference in Napa Valley this year. It was great to meet all of the people who use WordPress at scale across the media space and the lovely people behind it all at Automattic. Also crazy to see that the average development team size for […]