Secret Sauce: Smart People

There is no subsitute for smart, passionate people.

I attended the March Drupal Providence Meetup to see Matt Westgate, Co-Founder and President of Lullabot, give a presentation on website performance and scaling.   His case study was Grammy.com, a website that get's all it's traffic on one day each year, recently on February 13, 2011.  Grammy.com had 2+ Million hits per hour on Grammy night, a mind numbing stat.  Matt and his team were back stage with a group of content editors holding their breath at each commercial break when TV viewers were reminded to "Visit Garmmy.com for more...".   Matt's website implementation handled the stress of Lady Gaga's egg-stavagant entrance with grace. 

The nerds that attended the Drupal Meetup, me included, were treated to a detailed explanation of how Lullabot, the world's preimere Drupal advocate, architected the system to handle Grammy night.  While the technical answer was server configurations and software tools that cached pages and data, the true answer, the secret sauce,  was standing in front of us; Matt Westgate and his team - smart people with a passion to deliver a great user experience in a challenging environment.  When Grammy.com was crashing on Grammy night before Lullabot was involved, the tools and techniques implemented by Matt's team existed. Grammy.com was missing the secret sauce: Smart, Passionate people.

-S

To learn the technical details of Lullabot's implementation of Grammy.com, listen to Podcast 92: Gramm.com

Matt Westgate - Lullabot http://www.lullabot.com/about/team/matt-westgate @mettamatt

Providence Drupal Meetup - http://www.drupalpvd.org @drupalpvd