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Ops Meta-Metrics: Velocity 2010 Slides

June 24, 2010

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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Some WebOps Interview Questions

May 26, 2010

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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We’re hiring ops folks at Etsy!

April 23, 2010

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 – parallel gzip OMG

April 2, 2010

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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Agile Executive Podcast

February 12, 2010

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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Need some FUDforum consulting done

February 9, 2010

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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Deployment is just a part of dev/ops cooperation, not the whole thing

December 12, 2009

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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From one door to another

November 18, 2009

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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When you deploy: your internal monologue

October 7, 2009

The minimum cycle of questions you should be asking yourself. As brought up by @debuggist and @benjaminblack.

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WebOps: Good prep for becoming a new parent?

September 29, 2009

I think I’ve said before somewhere that working in the field of web operations prepared me somewhat for being a parent. I thought the other day that I should write down some of this reasoning, because it’s pretty often that I’m reminded of similarities: High availability Having redundant infrastructure is WebOps 101. For my kids’ [...]

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