bachelor thesis

In this article, seven distinctly different page loading profiling tools are compared: UA Profiler, Cuzillion, YSlow, Hammerhead, Apache JMeter, Gomez/Keynote/WebMetrics/Pingdom, Jiffy and Episodes. “Profiling” must be interpreted rather broadly: some of the tools cannot measure actual performance but are useful to gain insight in page loading performance characteristics.

If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.
— Lord Kelvin

The same applies to page loading performance: if you cannot measure it, you cannot know which parts have the biggest effect and thus deserve your focus. So before doing any real work, we will have to figure out which tools can help us analyzing page loading performance. “Profiling” turns out to be a more accurate description than “analyzing”:

I’ve been so caught up in work and reducing the amount of work (by lowering the number of projects I’m involved in), that I had not yet posted my results.

I finished my bachelor degree on July 7, 2009, with honors! (It’s actually honors over the entire course of the bachelor degree: it is calculated over all three years.) Most importantly though, I received an extremely high score for my bachelor thesis: 19/20! It’s the highest score possible (a perfect score of 20/20 is never given) and was the highest of my year. My bachelor thesis was considered of the level of a master thesis! (And for a master thesis, you get twice as much time to write it.)

Finally, my bachelor thesis has come to an end! I now have a very strong feeling of relief (because I managed to finish it in time!) and accomplishment (because it wasn’t always trivial to see the ligt at the end…). Now I can start studying for my upcoming exams, of which there are fortunately only two!

For those who don’t know yet, there are basically three big components:

1. Drupal Episodes module
2. the daemon, which performs the discovery, processing and syncing of files (it still doesn’t have a proper name — your suggestions are welcome!)
3. Drupal CDN integration module

For more information, I’d like to refer you to the bachelor thesis text draft that I’ve attached to this blog post and possibly even to the blog post in which I announced what my bachelor thesis would be about.

For my Episodes module to become useful, you also need to be able to easily analyze the collected data, to make sense of it all. The Episodes Server module aggregates all data and presents it, to allow the user to find the episodes that are the best candidates for optimization.
Because this is just a small part of my bachelor thesis, I decided to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), because this alone could be a master thesis on its own.
Clearly, the best way to present this, is through charts. Charting is old, is has existed for a long time. So you’d expect to find mature, complete solutions. It turned out my assumptions couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

Charting in Drupal is one of the most confusing and frustrating things you could do. Either the module is a wrapper around another API but limits you too much, or the underlying API is too limited itself.
My requirements were simple: I want horizontal bar charts, good looking charts and a usable API. I’ll go through all available modules one by one and cover their pros and cons briefly. That way, other Drupal developers have at least a starting point in evaluating charting solutions for Drupal.

In my session at DrupalCon DC, I promised an initial version of the Episodes module by March 15, which is today. I’m glad to be able to announce that I somewhat met that goal.

If you don’t know what it is exactly, I encourage you to read the project description first.

Status {#status}

It’s not yet completely finished: the basic reporting UI must still be written. But you can already look at the results of each individual page through the Firebug add-on (which I didn’t write, it’s already available). See the first screenshot for that. That’s of course much less useful, but it gives you a clear indication of the potential.
However, before I do that, I first have to work on making other deadlines for other courses.
So what’s done already? Here’s an overview:

After 15.5 hours of travelling (1.5 hours on the train, 8.5 hours of flying, 20 minutes of bus, 30 minutes in the metro and the rest spent waiting or walking), I arrived at the Harrington Hotel in Washington D.C. Immediately afterwards, I left for the pre-con registration, at which already about 400 people registered themselves.

Volunteering

The next day I got up at 6:08 AM since I couldn’t sleep due to the heat in the hotel room and because I was volunteering at the DrupalCon registration booth. With about 10 volunteers, we registered about 800 people in 2 hours (registering consists of giving them their lanyard, personalized name card, swag bag and redirecting them to the t-shirt booth). It worked pretty efficiently :)

Thanks, Drupal community! {#thank-you-bonnie}

I’d like to thank Bonnie Bogle once more for her Herculean organizing efforts. And of course a thank you to all attendees whom all partially paid for my travel expenses and Drupalcon ticket (I won a scholarship). I hope you’ll all benefit from my work in the end!

I went to FOSDEM on Sunday. I got up at 6 AM but went to bed at 2 AM (because I still had to review my presentation) … so I only had 4 hours of sleep! I met up with Jo Vermeulen and Tim Dupont at 7 AM in Hasselt’s station. Jo is a PhD student and Tim is a teaching assistant at Hasselt University.
I hesitated at first because both of them have teached me a course either this year or last year, so it’d be a bit weird. But getting to know people is virtually always more fun than pain, so what the heck, I traveled with them anyway!

I’ve got so much exciting good news that I don’t even know where to begin!

I was asked to review a Drupal book, was chosen to speak at FOSDEM, my bachelor thesis proposal will be published as part of a technical communications book, I turned 21 and was selected for a DrupalCon DC sponsorship! If only all of this happened while I wasn’t in the middle of my exam period…

Reviewing a Drupal book

Packt Publishing contacted me on January 7, asking if I was interested in reviewing Drupal 6 Site Builder Solutions. It’ll be my first book review, but I’ve always had eye for detail, consistency and clarity in books (I have yet to see the first U.S. college text book that is well written), so I hope it’ll be of use to somebody :)
You can expect the review towards the end of February. What interests me is that it’s targeted at business owners instead of developers, so I’ll do a practical test with my dad, who’s not technically adept.

I’ve alluded to it before, but now it’s also been officially approved: I’ll be doing my bachelor thesis on Drupal! I will focus on integrating Drupal with CDNs. Yay! :)

Don’t know what a CDN is? It’s short for Content Delivery Network; a network of (static file or streaming media) servers that are located around the globe. These servers all mirror each others’ files. When a user requests a certain file from the CDN, the server that is the closest to the user will serve the file.
By using a CDN to serve the static components on your web site (CSS, JS, images, fonts), your web site will load much faster: the latency will be lower and the throughput will be greater.