Attending the 2007 No Fluff, Just Stuff (NFJS) conference in Chicago (Itasca), the first session I attended was Enterprise Performance & Scalability by Ted Neward.

To start, the talk was excellent. Definitely chock full of useful information that you can walk away and start applying right away. If you’re interested in this stuff, I highly recommend that you check out Neward’s book, Effective Enterprise Java. I know I will be. I also recommend that you figure out when NFJS will be coming to a metropolitan area near you, and see if you can get his talk first hand.

Two points stuck out from his talk that I want to pass along.

1. 1.Myth - you know what the problem is
   

2. 2.Before you fix something, measure the problem.
   

First, the myth. This really hit a chord with me, because I’ve done it many times myself. A customer or manager comes around, describes a problem, and as a developer, I start thinking what the problem could be and quickly jump to a determination of the problem and an idea of what could solve it. Unfortunately, as Ted points out, our intuition sucks.

The problem is, systems are incredibly complex, and unfortunately, our intuition really does just suck. This leads into the second point. We need to measure.

Measuring means getting information on our applications performance and scalability. This needs to be done before we jump to conclusions or even ideas about where the problem is and what can be done to solve it. To do this, developers need to provide a means of measuring the application, before a problem develops - but certainly, when a problem presents itself, we need to first think about measuring it, getting some data, then drawing conclusions.