Besides being a Senior Consultant, I often get the privilege of conducting customer training sessions for Shunra. It is always a great time educating people on the value of WAN performance engineering and its immense importance when dealing with remote users and clients.
Part of our base training package is ‘performance engineering basics’. This is the absolute first module we talk about and it speaks at a basic level to whoever is in the class, be it developers, infrastructure, project management, etc. We discuss performance engineering and all the things that subject should entail when profiling a application from both the application side and infrastructure side. It is always amazing to listen to the conversations between application and infrastructure trainees when they understand that neither one is alone in this process. Both have a profound impact and the more information sharing that occurs, the better the deployment, which makes the application group look good and cuts down on firefighting on the infrastructure side afterwards which makes them happy too.
To this end, I am always reading up on performance engineering, as we can all take a page out of how other people approach their process and applications. One of my favorite things to do is going to Software Engineering Radio and listening to podcasts while getting other things accomplished. One very interesting podcast I listened to recently was Episode 125: Performance Engineering with Chris Grindstaff. I warn you that the podcast is about an hour long, but Chris is a performance engineer with IBM and it’s interesting to hear his take on some of IBM’s processes.
Enjoy
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