The GeekNight on Jan 30th was the first one hosted at ThoughtWorks for the year 2009. We had a couple of speakers, who enticed the audience with their talks.

Talk #1. XP and Design - "Where did the Design phase go?" by Paulo Caroli: ThoughtWorks

Paulo said that there was a misconception that XP does not promote design. According to Paulo, it is quite the opposite. In this session Paulo covered XP design, putting it in context with more traditional development approaches.

Paulo also explained how XP promotes continuous design improvement through Simple Design, Continuous Integration, Test Driven Development and Refactoring. By following the XP practices developers evolve their code (and design) using incremental proven steps. Moreover this is done without waste (over-design).

Talk #2. "High Performance Websites" by Shivku: Yahoo

Shivku spoke about how Yahoo! has gathered tools and guidelines to improve the response time of web pages. The talk also highlighted what one needs to know about HTTP, caching, and interesting tidbits about browser behavior.

Shivku also discussed the best practices gathered working with 20+ Yahoo! Properties. He also presented the response times of various websites and demonstrated some of the tools used in debugging & profiling the performance of web pages.

It sure was an evening to remember. For more information, you could check the wiki for this event.

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