One of the lynchpins of Web Reliability is fast load times. For more than a decade Cloudflare has been central to low latency, high availability best practices among web developers. And now Cloudflare is on the Solspace podcast. This is the first of a series of four podcast episodes where Zack Bloom, Head of Developer Marketing at Cloudflare and I go through, in detail, the many tools and capabilities of Cloudflare. Recently I have fallen behind Cloudflare. I knew I needed to get caught up when I had my clients from ProPublica on the podcast and they explained how thoroughly…

Part two of my interview with ecologist Sarah Spaulding discusses how our work reaches regular people. Through diatoms.org, Sarah (and by extension, Solspace) not only supplies resources to scientists around the globe, but also provides valuable information to primary, middle, and high school kids looking to pursue future careers in science. Having easy access to this information ensures a future of budding scientists and entrepreneurs who both understand how to find the information they need on the internet and use that information to solve the world’s problems. Being cognizant and aware of this kind of audience is essential to web…

This is the second half of my interview with Mike Tigas and Frank Sharpe. We continue our conversation about how ProPublica uses CloudFlare’s Workers KV system to serve most of the propublica.org website from the Edge. ‘From the Edge’ means from servers located as close to the end user as possible, thanks to a distributed network of data centers. We talk about how ProPublica has systems for baking pages. To bake a page means to push the HTML for a given url up into CloudFlare KV so that it is ready to be accessed by visitors to the site. Workers…

Remember when launching a new website meant flipping a switch and holding your breath? Yeah, that’s still the norm and it’s still terrifying. But the good people over at ProPublica have developed a solution to that problem. Mike Tigas and Frank Sharpe from ProPublica agreed to talk with me on the Solspace podcast to answer all of my dumb questions. You’ll love the way they have built their modern tech stack. It can handle massive global traffic without breaking a sweat. It can launch portions of a new website while leaving other sections untouched. It can respond quickly and easily…

Sarah Spaulding is an ecologist with the USGS as well as an INSTAAR fellow. And more importantly, she’s someone who follows her gut—and nature’s gut, for that matter. Her work centers around the study of diatoms, algae that produce 50% of the air we breathe. In this episode, Sarah and I discuss the importance of paying attention to the small things, whether that be the presence of diatoms in the environment or the instinct that something just isn’t quite right. Though the world values productivity, we often forget that in order to be productive we also have to be creative.…

Procrastination, or more accurately the results of it, have turned out to be a primary driving force and touchstone for web development in this pandemic moment. Small business owners have been putting off the necessary and important work of getting their businesses online for years. And now all of a sudden, online is the only place to be. Online revenue streams are at the root of what I talk about in my Web Reliability book. Ensuring that customers can easily and quickly find their way to your products and services online is the key to success. Too many business owners…

In part two of the interview with marketing and communications director for Songwriters Hall of Fame, April Anderson, we discuss one of the biggest questions of all time—How do you know when it’s right? Whether you’re talking about friendship or dating or website development, finding the right fit is integral to making your life and business work. Often, the right fit means finding a middle way—a mix of process and creativity. Procedures can allow clients to feel confident in your abilities, while openness to creativity allows clients to feel heard and assured that you can meet their unique needs. Sometimes…