My talk from Drupalcamp London Business Day on 1st March 2013
When building big websites, you're going to face a lot of problems regardless of your technology choice. This talk unveils some of the common problems, and shows how the Drupal community will help you solve these problems.
13. MONITORING
• All the common open source tools...
• Munin, Nagios, etc
• Plus some new ones
• New Relic, Boundary
• Social media
• saved our site...
23. YOU STILL NEED TO DO ALL
THE THINGS YOU WOULD DO
ON ANY BIG SOFTWARE
PROJECT
24. WHAT THINGS?
• Provide clarity of purpose • Code review
• Automated and manual • Source control
testing
• Release management
• Continuous integration
• Address technical debt
• Performance
testing and
benchmarking • Be agile (with a little ‘a’)
25. CLARITY OF PURPOSE
• Your team must know how to “do”
• The definition of “done”
• What “good” looks like
26. TESTING
• Know how you’re going to test, before you write a single line
of code
• Do it regularly
• Make it repeatable and consistent
• Automate as much as possible
• Test
Driven Development (TDD) or Behaviour Driven
Development (BDD) is even better
27. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
• Fail fast, Fail early
• Start your project the way you mean to go on
• Providean environment where developers are allowed to
make mistakes (not just dev)
• Automate your environment setup
• Regularlybuild your environments - including deploying to
production
28. “IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW
YOUR BUILD SCRIPT WORKS,
IT ONLY MATTERS THAT IT
WORKS”
29. PERFORMANCE TESTING
• Know what you’re aiming for
• Test early, test regularly
• Benchmark common journeys and monitor changes over time
• Memory usage, Page execution time etc
• Acknowledge that Production is your only real test
35. YOU’RE NOT THE FIRST
• Pressflow
• Published approaches to solving performance problems
• Catch’s Github page
• Drupal.org documented performance improvements
• Drupal 7 Fields optimisation (ported from Drupal 8)
• Porting performance improvements from newer versions
36. EXPERTS ARE OUT THERE
• Drupal issue queues
• Drupal High Performance Group
• IRC
• Meet-ups
• DrupalCamps and DrupalCons
• Large Scale Drupal (LSD) programme
38. CONTRIBUTION
• Contribution encourages good developer practice
• Testing: core changes always accompanied by a test
• Review: minimum of 2 people will review any change to
core
• Technical debt: critical issue thresholds block new features
39. SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE
• Route
• STOMP
• SQL No Revisions
• Drupal 8 Configuration Management Initiative (CMI)
• Test and Target
• Panels Filter Cache
• Various core and contrib patches
44. WRAPPING UP
• Ifyou’re building big, a lot of problems exist regardless of the
technology
• Drupal provides ways to solve these problems
• The Drupal community is one of the best communities to
have a problem in
• Drupal does scale, in performance, in people, in process
46. WE’RE HERE ALL WEEKEND
Come visit us on our stand
and see our other presentations
• Drupal 8 Configuration system for coders - Alex Pott (Sunday
10:30am)
• Please hold: your call is in a queue - Tom Phethean (Sunday 10:30am)
• zip-BDD-do-dah zip-BDD-ay! - Graham Taylor and Andrew
Larcombe (Sunday 11:30am)
47. IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS
• The Elephants are coming - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011905_university_washington.shtml
• Pillar Box - http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/post_boxes/edward_vii/index.html
• Jaws - http://edge.ascd.org/_Youre-Gonna-Need-a-Bigger-Boat/blog/6287739/127586.html
• Communication - http://familybugs.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/communication-part-1/
• Prioritisation - http://neilkillick.com/2011/12/17/tips-on-speedy-product-backlog-prioritisationordering/
• Remote working - http://www.wolfden.co.uk/RemoteWorking.html
• Redundancy - http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/07/workstation-backup-solutions-pt-3-redundancy/
• Scaling rock face - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexindigo/2571638877
• Christmas - http://www.tunisia-live.net/2011/12/23/christmas-celebrations-in-tunisia-tis-the-season/
• Volcanic ash cloud - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/apr/15/volcano-airport-disruption-iceland
• Technical debt - http://agileandbeyond.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/velocity-handle-with-care.html
• Reinventing the wheel - http://www.sbi-conferences.com/dont-reinvent-the-wheel.html