As expected, Velocity was excellent this year. What an awesome time to be in this field. Caveat for those who didn’t see/hear my talk: the graphs and numbers in the slides are, for the most part, made up. But they’re also in line with what I’ve seen at Flickr and Etsy. Ops Meta-Metrics: The Currency...
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It can be difficult to evaluate web ops candidates, for a couple of different reasons. One is that the breadth of knowledge needed for the field can be pretty wide, so spending too much time on any particular technical area can be a waste of time. Another reason is that it can be difficult to...
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At the Velocity Conference last year, I was talking to Mike Loukides from O’Reilly about the topics being presented and how it was so great to see such successful veterans of the field come out from behind the curtain and share their experiences. Mike said that there was interest in doing a book on the...
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We’re hiring web ops engineers at Etsy. Here’s the gist of it…. Responsibilities Building and maintaining Etsy’s infrastructure, from installed iron to production Taking part in a 24×7 on-call rotation Tightly cooperating and collaborating with development, product, community and customer care Requirements Experience with configuration management systems and concepts (Chef, Puppet, Cfengine, etc.) Experience in...
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Pigz is basically parallel gzip, to take advantage of multiple cores. When you’ve got massive files, this can be a pretty big advantage, especially when you’ve got lots of cores sitting around. Taking a 418m squid access log file, on a dual-quad Nehalem L5520 with HyperThreading turned on: [jallspaw@server01 ~]$ ls -lh daemon.log.2; time gzip...
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Yesterday I was on a podcast with Andrew Shafer and Michael Coté, and we talked about development and operations cooperation. I rambled a bit, like I tend to do. Andrew brought up something that’s disturbing, and I’ve seen elsewhere, which is that after seeing our presentation last year at Velocity, some folks decided that we...
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I’ve been helping out a friend for some years with running a decent-size discussion forum. It’s running on a little (512mb of RAM) dedicated server and it’s outgrown the box it’s on. It needs to move to a new machine, which is all ready to take it. Problem is, it’s in a twisty-maze of dependencies....
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Dev/Ops is what some people are calling the renewed cross-interest in development and operations collaboration. Hammond and I spoke about it, and there was even a conference in Europe dedicated to it. While I do think that there’s still a lot more that is to be discussed around this idea of cooperation and mixing of...
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One of my apprehensions in moving to New York from San Francisco was a common concern: why would I move from the ‘epicenter’ of the web to a place where it’s not? There’s been lots written about startup hub cities, and innovative web metro areas, but the fact of the matter is that New York...
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Last week I gave 2 month’s notice – I’ll be leaving Flickr in January. When Stew and Cat asked me to join Flickr in January of 2005, I felt like it was time to go and do something different, so I said yes. Five years (and four billion photos) later, it’s again time to go...
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