Jonathan Howell

For those of you familiar with my previous work travel patterns, you may be a little surprised to to see me positively requesting to be sent to Texas. Well, it’s not DFW on this occasion; my proposal to present on Agile Development at South by Southwest in Austin has made it to the Panel Picker stage - where the community gets to vote on which of the proposed sessions they would like to see at the conference.

So please make sure European start-ups are adequately represented there, and vote for my session: From Fragile to Agile: Efficient Development for Startups. And while you are there, vote for Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin’s session too: Hiring 101: Building a Team of Peers. And maybe get yourself a ticket too?

A high availability website is not all about expensive redundant hardware with top of the line load balancers and an enterprise class SAN. There are several cheap or free steps you can take to ensure uptime; in fact if you’re not taking these steps you are wasting your money on your redundant hardware. See my article on Think Vitamin for my top five things that bring sites down, and what you can do about them.