BestPartyEver.com Development

Hey Guys,

  It’s been quite a few weeks since I last posted.  I thought I would update you on my current tinker toys that I do during the day.  I’m a full time CTO/Developer as well as Partner with BestPartyEver.com.  After quite a bit of busy weeks developing we have launched our alpha version of the software and are going through a series of micro-releases.  It’s quite nice to work with a small, but agile team, creating a tremendous amount of growth in this application that has been needing an overhaul for quite a while.  We debuted a new Budget Calculator today that uses auto-saving and live calculations.  Numerous weeks went into making a new javascript library for the site that uses multi-level namespaces for organizing the code for re-use, speed, and compliance with third-party libraries and the silly global namespace issues with prototype, etc.   Some fun modern usability technologies were used to create better site navigation such as  the tag cloud on party ideas.  We can definitely see the popularity of halloween party ideas during this season.  We used geoip tracking to automatically detect the user’s region they are browsing from to target ad locations.  Leveraging an open source tech for this one, hostip.info, we transformed the data layer of hostip to fit snug in with our architecture and still be updated on a regular basis to make the ip system more accurate.  We also developed a layer between Best Party Ever and WordPress MU.  This was a fantastic idea as we didn’t want to redevelop the wheel here and we can re-use technologies developed for the wordpress platform for blogging reducing a mountain of work on our part.  Don’t forget that we do full code reviews before deciding on technologies to be part of our core system.  I’ll write a bit more about the daytime party that I live later.  Take care.

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Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle

Economist Vilfredo Pareto found in 1897 that about 80 percent of Italy’s wealth was owned by about 20 percent of the population.8 This has become the 80/20 rule or the Pareto principle, which is often applied to a variety of disciplines. Although some say it should be adjusted to a 90/10 rule, this rule of thumb applies to everything from employee productivity and quality control to programming.

Barry Boehm found that 20 percent of a program consumes 80 percent of the execution time.9 He also found that 20 percent of software modules are responsible for 80 percent of the errors.10 Donald Knuth found that more than 50 percent of a program’s run time is usually due to less than 4 percent of the code.11 Clearly, a small portion of code accounts for the majority of program execution time. Concentrate your efforts on these hot areas.

I just recently was doing some research on Javascript Optimization techniques and found this wonderful section on The Pareto Principle.  If you haven’t already read the above two paragraphs, please do.  If you feel brave, please try out this guide on Optimizing Javascript code.

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