Read the original article at Sales sucks, but then I learned

Are you a developer or startup entrepreneur? Have you ever been frustrated with some of the claims made by the sales team or lacked the patience or ability to communicate across departments? Join 4000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. Just out of college Just out of college I got a job as [...]

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1. Beware the sales wolf in sheep suits

Read the original article at Dinner, dollars & devlishly creative thinking

Efficiency at Dinner? I just finished reading Tyler Cowen’s opus, An Economist Gets Lunch. I have to admit I’m already a fan of his writing, getting a daily dose on from his blog Marginal Revolution. Join 4000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. What I like about this book is that it is [...]

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1. Where’s my 80 million dollars?

Read the original article at When You Have to Take the Fall

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. One of the biggest jobs in operations is monitoring. There are so many servers, databases, webservers, search servers, backup servers. Each has lots of moving parts, lots that can go wrong. Typically if you have monitoring, and react to that monitoring, you’ll head off bigger problems later. [...]

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1. Open Insights 49 – Things Fall Apart
2. Service Monitoring – What is it and why is it important?

Read the original article at Ken Auletta Gets Us Googled

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. The title sounds vaguely fatalistic, the end of the world is nigh, that kind of thing. It turns out though that Auletta is a journalist having reported over the years a lot on old media. So when he says “as we know it” he’s speaking as much [...]

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1. iHeavy Insights 62 – Context
2. What Wouldn’t Google Do?

Read the original article at When You’re Hired to Solve a People Problem

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. A good five years ago I worked for a firm in online education. Among various products they provided through their website, they were struggling with a process to get content churned out more quickly. The bottleneck was slowing down their business, and limiting the new products they [...]

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1. Why do people leave consulting?
2. Sometimes… let things break a little

Read the original article at Switch to the cloud – shift of a century

The switch to cloud is way bigger than you think A Review of Nicholas Carr’s book “The Big Switch”, available on Amazon here. Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Do you work in devops or as a performance consultant? Do you manage web applications backed by databases? If so you probably love high [...]

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1. The New Commodity Hardware Craze aka Cloud Computing
2. Migrating to the Cloud – Why and why not?
3. A History lesson for Cloud Detractors
4. Cloud Computing – What is it and why is it important?
5. Cloud Operations Interview

Read the original article at When Clients Don’t Pay – Consulting War Stories

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. It’s a cold cold winter out there, so as they say you need money to keep the lights on? Yep, that’s true whether you’re a small business or a consultant. Everyone has to pay their bills. Or do they? It’s an unfortunate fact of life in business, [...]

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1. Going Solo for Fun or Profit?
2. Top 3 Questions From Clients
3. Consulting essentials: Getting the business
4. You’re Too Young To Be My Boss
5. Consulting essentials: Managing & Completing Engagements

Read the original article at Fear a zombie invasion? Try algorithms & bots

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Have you read any of those tongue in cheek books on how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse? They’re funny in their own way, and reading Chris Steiner’s book it was the first image that popped into my head. Countless industries falling to the algorithm invasion I [...]

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1. Review – Who Moved My Cheese

Read the original article at Why your cloud is speeding for a scalability cliff

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Don’t believe me that you’re headed for the cliff? A startup scales up to no avail Towards the end of 2012 I worked with an internet startup in the online education space. Their web application was not unusual, built in PHP and using Linux, Apache & Mysql [...]

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1. 3 Ways to Boost Cloud Scalability
2. Cloud Operations Interview
3. Your Database – A Long-Haul Truck Or A Sports Car?
4. 5 Tips for Scalability
5. Cloud Deployment Interview

Read the original article at A master isn’t born but made

A review of Mastery by Robert Greene. Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power was a great read, offering endless lessons for business and personal dealings. When I saw he just published a new book, I was quick to grab a copy. What I like about his writing [...]

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1. Open Insights 58 – Ownership

Read the original article at Going Solo for Fun or Profit?

Sara Horowitz has serious chops. Independent herself, she started Freelancer’s Union way back in 1995. Back then it was tougher as a freelancer. Through her great efforts, we’ve all benefited. So when I saw she’d published a guide called “Freelancer’s Bible”, I was quick to grab a copy. And the book doesn’t disappoint. I wish [...]

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1. Why do people leave consulting?
2. You’re Too Young To Be My Boss
3. Thank You for Arguing – Persuasion for fun and profit
4. iHeavy Insights 63 – Slow To Credit

Read the original article at Lessons from Locksmiths and the 99%

Just finished reading Dan Ariely’s new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. What a great title for a book on cheating & lying. Dishonesty is pretty easy to understand, isn’t it? We know when someone is being honest or not, and we ourselves are of course never dishonest? Or so we think. Well your preexisting [...]

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1. Business lessons from brokering a half million dollar deal
2. Amazon EC2 Outage – Failures, Lessons and Cloud Deployments

Read the original article at Anatomy of a Performance Review

A lot of firms come to us with a specific scalability problem. “Our user base is growing rapidly and the website is falling over!” Or they’re selling more widgets, “Our shopping cart is slowing down and we’re seeing users abandon their purchases”. These are real startup growing pains, so what to do? We like to [...]

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1. iHeavy Insights 81 – Web Performance Metrics
2. Performance Metrics – What are they and why are they important?
3. Ask Me Questions – Scalability, Performance, Cloud Computing
4. How To Build Highly Scalable Web Applications For The Cloud

Read the original article at Powerful punchy prose, big hit blog

Word Hero sounds familiar doesn’t it? I had bumped into the title here and there. I finally picked up a copy when I realized it was by the same author as my recent favorite Thank You For Arguing – Jay Heinrichs. Turns out his title inspiration was Guitar Hero, and therein lies the secret to [...]

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Read the original article at Opportunity a day – career risk at bay

Free Agent. Stress Test. Avoid Sameness As the globalization juggernaut rolls on, it continues to create more Detroits. Skills and perspectives quickly become obsolete. What to do in the face of such change? So there’s your quick answer. Get the book if you want more! Some related material: why is it so hard to find [...]

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1. The risk of living in a filter bubble
2. Business plans are bunk

Read the original article at Social Scoring with Klout, Kred & PeerIndex

Klout, Kred or PeerIndex… What’s with all these new social scoring sites? I wanted to know the answer, so I picked up a copy of Return on Influence. Schaefer’s book is not intimidating, it’s a short 180 pages plus a short appendix with a primer on all things social media. Upon first opening the book, [...]

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1. Pro Blogging with the Pros

Read the original article at Business lessons from brokering a half million dollar deal

I’ve had my Manhattan loft in the market for some six months now. After dropping the asking price a couple of times, buyers are finally circling, and I’m close to finalizing a deal.  In that time however, I’ve learned some big lessons.  Real Estate, is the epitome of cutthroat capitalism and as such has some very [...]

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1. Business plans are bunk
2. iHeavy Insights 67 – Golden Rule In Business
3. Metrics Bridge Gap Between IT & Business Units
4. Open Insights 51 – Stretch Your Database Dollar
5. Consulting essentials: Getting the business

Read the original article at Pro Blogging with the Pros

I picked up a copy of the Problogger book and flipped to the Blog Promotion chapter.  In it they recommended – Create compilation pages. I tried it I crafted a new post, selected some of my blogs most popular material, organized it with nice punchy one line summaries, and after about 20 minutes posted it.  [...]

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1. We’re Blogging From Oracle OpenWorld 2007

Read the original article at Why the Android ecosystem is broken

Six months ago I got this crazy idea. Why not leave the mothership? Give up on iPhone and try Android. This is what being tech-agnostic is about, I thought––not being wedded to a single platform. Besides, the iPhone’s digital keypad just wasn’t working for me. I got a monthly Boost Mobile plan, which uses Sprint. Service was [...]

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1. iHeavy Insights 62 – Context
2. Venue Analytics – What is it and why is it important?
3. iHeavy Insights 69 – Fewer Moving Parts
4. Mobile Scalability – What is it and why is it important?

Read the original article at Tyranny of a Google vote

For the past year I’ve been seeing headline blogs analyzing the effect of Google’s last algorithm update, dubbed the Panda. There was much talk of unfair relegation from the first page of Google search results, and general indignance by the SEO community. As with any subject in which I only have cursory knowledge I didn’t [...]

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1. Top Five Easy Ways to Search Engine Optimization
2. What Wouldn’t Google Do?
3. Open Insights 11 – Google Wave or Tsunami

Read the original article at The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

Habits. We all have them. The good ones we celebrate, but the bad ones we struggle with. Duhigg’s book may introduce some ideas to those of us less familiar with behavioral sciences but it fails to effectively teach us how to form good habits and break the bad ones. Filled with pages of stories from [...]

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Read the original article at The myth of five nines – Why high availability is overrated

Also find Sean Hull’s ramblings on twitter @hullsean. In the Internet world 24×7 has become the de facto standard. Websites must be always on, available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In our pursuit of perfection, performance is being measured down to three decimal places, that is being up 99.999% of the time; [...]

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1. Oracle 10g RAC Versus DataGuard For High Availability
2. High Availability – What is it and why is it important?
3. Open Insights 28 – High Availability
4. Sharding – What is it and why is it important?
5. Cloud Computing – Disciplined Deployments

Read the original article at The risk of living in a filter bubble

I’ve been looking for this book for a long time. Or maybe I should rephrase that. I was pondering this topic and had been looking for a book which covered it for a while so I was pleased to come across The Filter Bubble. Digging into search engine optimization and analytics while building my own [...]

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1. Top Five Easy Ways to Search Engine Optimization

Read the original article at Oracle to MySQL – prepare to bushwhack through the open source jungle

I was recently approached by a healthcare company for advice on suitable database solutions capable of executing its new initiative. The company was primarily an Oracle shop so naturally, they began by shopping for possible Oracle solutions. The CTO relayed his conversation with the Oracle sales rep, who at first recommended an Oracle solution that, [...]

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1. Oracle & Open Source Projects – The Interviews
2. Open Insights 03 – The Business of Open Source
3. Open Source – What is it and why is it important?
4. Open Insights 07 – Open Source in the Enterprise
5. Oracle Expert – New York City

Read the original article at A handy guide for PHP and MongoDB Web Development

What makes a beginner’s guide handy is when it speaks to your intuition. It anticipates the burning questions that follow from a newbie trying to grasp new concepts and it quickly answers them. PHP and MongoDB Web Development – Beginner’s Guide is one such guide. I hadn’t heard of Packt Publishing or Rubayeet Islam before [...]

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1. NOSQL Database – What is it and why is it important?
2. Migrating MySQL to Oracle Guide
3. MySQL Cluster In The Cloud – Managers Guide
4. Dummy’s Guide to Linux firewalls