Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
Meet Andrea McNett (@andreamcnett). She’s a spunky coder, designer, and developer (designeloper) living in Minneapolis, MN. She spends her working days as an Associate Designer at Pixel Farm, a full-service creative agency making brands like Target, General Mills, and the NHL glow. Check out some of the company’s latest work here.
Off the clock, you’ll find McNett nibbling on some dark chocolate, day-dreaming about her semester abroad in Scotland, and snuggling up with a cat or two.
With both her right and left brain firing on all cylinders, McNett bubbles with creativity and passion for her work, which blends math, design, psychology, and art. But we’ll let her tell you more…
Q: How did you discover your passion for digital design?
A: Growing up, I loved art and math equally. In high school, I joined the school newspaper. As nerdy as it sounds, page layout was a lot of fun for me, so I researched graphic design as a career option and ultimately ended up going to college for it. In college, I had trouble completely letting go of my left-brain skills, so I ended up learning how to code. Being a designer/developer at Pixel Farm (or designeloper as my creative director calls me) strikes the perfect balance between technical know-how and creativity. I love coming up with ideas as much as I love making them.
Q: Where do you find your inspiration when working?
A: It’s cliché, but I find music inspirational, particularly when coding. The right music helps me work through a problem and makes me more productive. Professionally, I think the best inspiration can be found browsing the Internet and soaking it all in. Everyone at Pixel Farm is really good at this so we’re always sending links to each other. I’m forever amazed by how the Internet can bring people together–it’s an honor to be able to wake up each day and help make that happen.
Q: If you could have any superhero power, what would it be?
A: Is there a superhero that never needs to sleep? That would be awesome.
Q: If you could take any fictional character out for a drink, whom would you choose and what would you drink?
A: This is the hardest question yet! Renée in the Elegance of the Hedgehog (it’s okay–nobody has read this book) is one of my all-time favorite characters. She’s French, I suppose we’d drink wine.
Q: What would you tell your 13 year old self?
A: At some point, you’ll figure out that you don’t have to know everything. The sooner you get there, the better.
Emma Bauer is a Being Geek Chic Contributor. Clearly, she’s got great taste. She is a PR enthusiast, dog lover, tea drinker, art appreciator, and of course, aspires to Be Geek Chic. Follow her on Twitter: @emmalynnbauer
Many people have been wondering how Target.com could be experiencing such massive failures from their launch of the Missoni collaboration. Budget fashionistas everywhere knew that this collection would be huge, but stores with empty shelves? A site that says nothing but “woof!” for nearly 24 hours?
I asked a developer at work, named Pete (he’s totally awesome!) what he thinks might have contributed to the disaster. Here’s his rundown:
- Too many files to download (161 total).
- 138 images total; images should be combined where possible. … elements like “Save $1” [should use] a single file instead of approaching double the number of images you might actually need.
- 81 http requests to a single host. Even if you’re load-balanced and/or running on a CDN, browsers still (I think) enforce limits on concurrent connections to hosts by name and/or IP, i.e. you can ask for 81 images but your browser will only download or the server might only serve eight at a time.
- There are 14 separate JavaScript files. Even minified, 14 requests is too many. You can reasonably get this down to 2-3 requests for most browsers.
- 1.8MB to download the homepage.
All of this on its own doesn’t mean a site will fail, but they may not have scaled up server capacity when they launched the new site a few weeks back. So how does this compare to other retail websites?
For sake of comparison, the Amazon.com homepage currently downloads 114 files and 859K. … I suspect they’re hitting concurrent connection limits on their server, or noticing a significant enough delay in serving content that they believe it’s better to serve their “woof”/“we’re getting hammered” page than it is to let their actual site load slowly.
So there you have it, some contributing reasons why the site may have failed. The site was redesigned less than a month ago and while the overall visuals and cart process may have improved, it appears they weren’t adequately set up on the back end to handle all those extra visitors.
