I do, of course, think this is changing as of recently. The punch line is that I obviously did take the job, despite my misgivings about not being surrounded by people who are constantly thinking about my industry. One of the reasons I got over not being in the ‘epicenter’ is that Fred Wilson and Albert Wenger did an insanely good job at convincing me it was a good idea. Another reason is that I think Etsy is basically a Bay Area company that just happens to be in Brooklyn. I mean that as a compliment.

So while I always had some inkling of what ‘epicenter of the web’ means, I was never really sure how that could be measured. Indeed.com has indirectly measured it by the # of job listings.  O’Reilly did something similar for the # of startup jobs in 2006.

Number of jobs is interesting, but I thought it might be fun to measure it by locations of headquarters as seen through the lens of monthly unique users. So, I took the Quantcast “Top 100″ sites, found the latitude and longitude of the headquarters of each site via Crunchbase’s API, as well as other bits around the web, and Aaron helped out with the excellent Modest Maps to make this:

Quantcast Top 100 plotted on U.S. Map, radius = monthly uniques

Like I said, this doesn’t change my thoughts about the new job, or what I think ‘epicenter of the web’ means. But, still interesting, dontcha think?

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the raw data: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tLwD1C5mghn9U3XJj_yqyjw&output=html

If there’s anything wrong, lemme know.

Let me start with this: I don’t think I can overstate how right-on this paper is, with respect to the challenges, solutions, observations, and concerns involved with operating a medium to large web infrastructure. I found this via @benjaminblack, and I agree with him 100%: this should be considered required reading for anyone in our industry. I’m not sure if Cook ever thought that his paper would apply to web infrastructure, but I think it can and does. Please take 30 minutes right now and read it.

There are a number of salient points in the paper that I’d like to comment on. Again, this is through the lens of failures of complex systems as it pertains to web operations:

7) Post-accident attribution accident to a ‘root cause’ is fundamentally wrong.

I’m going to guess that this portion may be viewed as controversial in the prevailing webops wisdom, where post-mortems are for sure necessary, but whose content may or may not be effective in preventing similar types of failure. I do value the process of a post-mortem, because I think the human element of understanding complex failures is important and doing whatever you can to put in place safety is good, modulo what is said in section #16 of the paper. I believe that even a rudimentary process of “5 Whys” has value. But at the same time, I also think that there is something in the spirit of this paragraph, which is that there is a danger in standing behind a single underlying cause when there are systemic failures involved. Doing this can lead to the false belief that you’ve got this mode covered, you’ve found the silver bullet that made the whole mountain crumble, and jeez what a relief because that will never bite us again.

14) Change introduces new forms of failure.

I totally agree with this point. However, I often see this as a rallying point for operations teams to say “No!” to change, when instead they should be working alongside development (and product owners) with a goal of reducing the risk of failure associated with each change. I do not believe that ‘release early, release often’ in and of itself can reduce that risk. I believe that the real (and only) way to do this is both technical and cultural. But I’ve spoken about this before.

16) Safety is a characteristic of systems and not of their components

Emphasis on “Safety cannot be purchased or manufactured; it is not a feature that is separate from the other components of the system.” Real safety comes from smart people doing smart things to the entire shebang, not the individual guts.

and I think the point I love the most, with all of my heart:

18) Failure free operations require experience with failure.

Fear is a strong emotion. I believe it can be used as a strong motivator for ensuring safety in the face of constant change, instead of a reason to push back on the very idea of change. Embrace fear of outages and degradation. Use it to guide your architecture, your code, your infrastructure. So lean into it.

There are a lot of great points in the paper, and I could go on, but you get the idea.

IMHO, being able to do this is one of the things that makes a good web ops person. The examples might be “useless”, but the process is invaluable.

I still have two chapters to go before it’s all finished, but if you’re nice enough to take a look at what I’ve got thus far, I’d appreciate any feedback. I’m sure there could be typos and some graphs misaligned, but such is life with “drafts”.

Rock. Thanks, David Plonka.

1. After graduating from Umass/Amherst with a Mechanical Engineering degree, I worked at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center, doing side-impact crashworthiness research for the NHTSA. We ran transient dynamic finite-element analysis simulations using LS-DYNA and rigid-body simulations with MADYMO3D. This is where I learned UNIX, because we ran the simulations on big SGI Origin compute servers, T3 Cray machines, Intel Paragons, and even AIX RS/6000s.

2. I’ve been playing guitar since I was about 13 years old, and after playing live many bluegrass, metal, jamband covers, and pop songs, I still can’t seem to do anything with jazz improvisation except faking it.

3. In high school I was a major gearhead, and tricked out all of my 3 1980s VW GTIs for extra horsepower. My introduction to automotive repairs was replacing the front left transaxle on my 1977 VW Scirocco in my driveway. This enthusiasm for cars also led me to be one ‘bad driving’ point away from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles seizing my license. (I drive slower now)

4. In 1999, I moved to San Francisco and after a short stint at Genentech, I went to work at Salon.com for Chad Dickerson, who continues to be my all-time favorite manager. I learned a lot from Chad, and am lucky enough to work with him at Yahoo!.

5. I was born in The Ozarks, then moved to north suburban Boston. Depending on how much I’ve had to drink, I either have a Boston accent, or a slight southern-ish accent.

And now, as Norby points out…I tag Sara Wood, Aaron Cope, Dathan, Kellan, and George.