Thursday, September 24, 2009

Giving answers - messing around at Stack Overflow

I got onto SO a couple of days ago. Since then I have learnt an incredible amount of Java and Python via the quickfire question-answer system. There are interesting community bits too. It is almost like an MMO in design, the only monsters to hunt are niggling technical problems. Here is the joke of the board in my opinion and a solution to an important user satisfaction issue - load times.
Load times and data streaming is what has made the whole load pages by bit movement in the new internet design so popular. Good design makes portions of the content to the user and the input from the user atomic, allowing partial refreshes. People expect instant responses (within 1/16 second) - a lot of other factors come into play while delivering this:
  1. Server processing capacity
  2. Network bandwidth
  3. Client machine rendering capacity
  4. Concurrent users
  5. Any other bottleneck you can think about
Optimizing the user experience is what good products are built upon.

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