This is the first of a series of blogs on how to architect, engineer and manage performance. In it, I’d like to attempt to demystify performance by defining it clearly as well as describing methods and techniques to achieve performance requirements. I'll also cover how to make sure the requirements are potentially achievable.

New year, and time for the annual trends webinar. It’s the third time I have the honor to present it. As always, it takes a village to create this, and I’m thankful for all the people who chipped in. I’d like to highlight in particular Murray Grigo McMahon. His blog on data as an ecosystem, as well as great discussions, was a big source of inspiration, and will feature in the trends. This year, the title of the webinar is “The Dawn of Postmodern Analytics”.

Google BigQuery is a serverless enterprise data warehouse tool that’s designed for scalability. We built BigQuery to be highly scalable and let you focus on data analysis without having to take care of the underlying infrastructure. We know BigQuery users like its capability to query petabyte-scale datasets without the need to provision anything. You just upload the data and start playing with it.

Some products you build because you want to. Others you build because you have to. In the case of Bugfender’s brand-new plug-in for React Native, it was definitely the latter. Like the rest of the development world, we’ve come to rely on this cross-platform framework to build killer apps across Android, iOS and web. But that’s not why we’ve built our plug-in. No, it’s because our users were building their own versions!