In a recent article on TechCrunch about Agile Methodologies, the Comment Wall quickly became a flame war with such pithy commentary as "Agile is a load of ****." I've posted a couple times on what I like about Agile and what I don't like. A lot of people in the comments section complained that Agile was just management jargon. But a lot of people said Agile was the bee's knees because up-front planning sets you up for failure if some unforeseen disaster strikes, like say the U.S. Economy's horrendousness. I find myself in the middle. I love Agile's short iterations and its focus on scope. But too often Agile is held aloft as a panacea that teams can use to immediately begin producing perfect code in half the time; that just hasn't been our experience.

Here is an interesting article that describes 14 big companies, which began in the worst of times.

http://www.insidecrm.com/features/businesses-started-slump-111108

Congratulation to Max Murphy, a member of our team  who just had a beautiful baby girl.

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Welp, we're down here in Anaheim with our ELC peeps learning all about eXtreme Programming and project management. We're hoping to improve the workflow of our group, focusing on how to deal with the myriad projects we're responsible for. And we're having dinner at the Pirates of the Caribbean ride restaurant, which everyone (especially Ed) is super pumped about. We heart Disney.

We spent most of the day getting a few new apps on out multi-app server in AWS.

It's very cool but why should this take a full day?

Amazon's S3 service was down for about 6 hours on Sunday, which drastically affected Fan Profiles. All of the image-based services provided by that product were basically not working, which needless to say was disappointing...

Amazon's Simple Storage Service (or S3) is a service that lets you create, delete, or access data objects (like images) securely using REST or SOAP protocols. It works hand-in-hand with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2) to create a simple and rapidly scalable hosting solution. The benefits of not having to worry about maintaining stores of physical servers and not wasting rack space and engineer's time planning for those one or two days where traffic is wildly higher than average far outweighs the drawbacks of having to deal with this newish technology that is clearly still working out all of the kinks. As SmugMug pointed out in their post on the issue, these outages are few and far between and are generally resolved (reasonably) quickly.

Clearly it's disappointing that Amazon's already experienced two fairly extended outages this year (couple hours each). It's a little unnerving that the complexity of the infrastructure is such that the entire service can go down - Sunday it was all all of the EU and the US! But given that these outages are the exception and not the norm and that cloud computing seems to be the wave of the future and S3 works so nicely with Amazon's EC2 service, it's still a viable solution.