ScottRu

Jul

Newcomer’s Guide to Foo Camp

0 Comments Categories: Foo Camp and foocamp08

This was my first year attending Foo Camp, Tim O’Reilly and O’Reilly Media’s annual gathering of new and old friends. (Thanks are certainly due to Jesse Robbins and Brady Forrest, who have helped me connect to the O’Reilly community and who no doubt helped make the invitation appear.) TechCrunch has a great summary of this year’s event, with some excellent comments from attendees.

While I’m only 24 hours home and still only quarter-brained, I thought I’d write some hints down for next year’s newbies. There are some great resources about Foo Camp online - the 2008 Foo Camp Wiki and Scott Berkun’s collection of articles are just two - but I thought I’d add a few things to help out.

Force yourself through the shellshock. It is strange showing up on the O’Reilly campus and seeing folks who you’ve been reading/listening to/building because of just chatting with each other. Being around people who are famous (at least to you, maybe not so much your mom) is strange, and it’s easy to seek out the few people you do know and chat with them.
My advice: get through it as fast as possible and get to the other side. It took me ~2 hours to stop talking to just the Seattle people. There’s wine if you need it - I just forced it until it became natural in an hour. (Talking about something you know with someone you don’t really helps.) I met almost nobody who was too pretentious to talk to the more unknown people at the camp - there was an assumption that everybody had interesting things to talk about.

It’s also worth remembering that almost everyone is going through that same thought process - one non-slouch-himself said that in every conversation, “I could always tell why that person was here, but I couldn’t tell why I was here.” I just called it “Impostor Syndrome Camp.”

Introvert? Extrovert? Worrywart? Just fake it ’til you make it. The experience will be better for it.
Talk about something you know. Two things here: first, Talk. Do something: run a session, give a lightning talk, something. Be in production at least as much as you’re in marketing; produce at least as much as you consume, in the O’Reilly lingo.
Second, make it about something you know. This may seem counter-intuitive, as Foo is supposed to include a lot of learning about things you don’t know, but 1) this isn’t the place to not know what you’re talking about, and 2) people do know who you are and want to hear about the things you do.

I was fortunately dragged along on this one, when Steve Souders asked me to join him to talk about making faster web pages. I spoke about Jiffy, Steve talked about some of his new ideas, we had a lot of conversation with people from organizations big and small, and it tied me to something that was concrete for others and led to a number of followup conversations. (I also learned that Jiffy is spreading much faster than I knew… more examples to come on that later.)

You don’t have to just talk about areas you’re an expert: I also led a session on Unexpected Consequences of Software, which I could talk about intelligently but which others could know better, and it wasn’t bad - but it wasn’t as good, either. I also did a proto-Ignite talk on making your first open source project, which I’ll likely turn into a real Ignite talk for later in the year.

Oh, and don’t stress about the signup board. I say the mad rush is overstated, and I know - I was pinned against it for about 5 minutes, and then just watched people for another ~20 (and the board still had plenty of space). There were still a few signup sessions open >24 hours after the conference started. If you want to talk about something, you’ll find people to talk with. (Of course, before you do, read Scott Berkun’s required reading on running an unconference session.)
Practice Serendipitous Session Selection. All of the advice said “go listen to things you don’t know anything about” - I didn’t even know how to pick those, and so a few times I found myself just wandering about for the first five minutes until a home felt right. Sunday morning, I just walked by some tents and saw Linda Stone leading a session with some people I had talked with earlier, and I just sat down. It ended up being about Attention Hacks - ways to improve your ability to focus - and let’s just say that we’re all ready to build some very cool things after that hour.
I saw some other newcomers plan out their whole schedule in advance: my advice is pick the next session when it’s time to go - it enables more magical things to happen.
Play a little. Join a Werewolf game, play whatever crazy thing Jane or Robin (whose game I was too late to play ) or Elan or someone else will bring, find a demo, something that forces you into a different kind of interaction. Does wonders for your confidence and creates memories (and YouTube videos). Every conversation doesn’t have to be dripping with meaning, and you aren’t wasting your time not having them.

That’s all. Thanks for the invite, O’Reilly folks, and I hope to join next year’s newcomers!

Jul

Speaking for the only-speaking

0 Comments Categories: Random

So I’m reading the New Yorker article on Sheldon Adelson’s political maneuverings and I came across the following passage:

“About three hours later DeLay calls and he tells Sheldon, ‘You’re in luck,’ ” he continued, “ ‘because we’ve got a military-spending bill. . . . We’re not going to be able to move the bill, so you tell your mayor that he can be assured that this bill will never see the light of day.’… (According to DeLay’s spokeswoman, DeLay does not recall the conversation and had no role in blocking the bill)

And my immediate reaction is this:

Tom DeLay has a spokeswoman?

Political opinions aside, what exactly does Tom DeLay need a spokeswoman for? Wikipedia says his current work includes a ghostwritten blog and a book he wrote with a professional writer. Otherwise, all he does is speak - to the press, at least, says Google News. Speaking is his job: he needs someone else to speak sometimes? Maybe this is some sort of post-Congressional pension - your own (or shared) spokesperson?

What does this person do all day? How often does she have to speak for the person who at this point just speaks? Does she speak for other people as well?

Perhaps this post will become the #1 SEO result for “Tom DeLay Spokeswoman,” and she’ll Google herself, and she’ll respond. We can only hope that I can corner that search niche.

Jul

Not-at-all-fun things to do with Twitter

1 Comment Categories: Technology and Twitter

Every once in a while I hit another breathless article about all the cool things you can do with Twitter. Most of them involve either following things I don’t actually care about or submitting obscure numbers for reasons unknown.

So here’s the start of a list of things that might seem less fun.

Get your stuff stolen. When I get into burglary, I’ll start with Twitter. Hey, Ian’s at a play! That’s plenty of time to take his MacBook and mardi gras beads.
Get spammed. OK, The Onion stopped, but still, it’s like double opt-in to friendly spam.
Be fooled by a fake celebrity. Ira Glass? Fake Ira Glass, currently dealing in non-sequiturs. (Some were likely devastated.)
Keep up with dictators.

(Sadly, I believe Twitter has started blocking the creation of other dictator’s names: Pol Pot & Robert Mugabe were “unavailable” but have no pages. Probably that’s a good thing.)
Wait for pages to load. You already knew that one, but I was Internetally obligated to include it. Sorry, I don’t make the law.

Anything else to add?

Jun

Starting a Seattle CTO Support Group

0 Comments Categories: Seattle and Technology

I’ve been thinking for a while about trying to put together a Seattle “CTO Support Group” and have mentioned this to a few folks, and I’m finally kicking this off. I posted basically this message to the Seattle Tech Startups mailing list this past Friday, but I’m not sure who that hits and misses. I’ve had ~20 people express interest so far.

Opening thoughts:

Attendees are CTOs (or whatever title denotes “head of technology” - software and ops) at local companies/govts/etc. Starting point is that this is one person in a company, feel free to tell me that this doesn’t make sense for your organization, but the goal isn’t a replacement for other tech gatherings with more open invites.
Figure the makeup of the group will determine the balance between small/medium/large companies, private v. public, funded v. bootstrapped, etc. Early folks have been primarily (but not entirely) small startups.
Would have regular get-togethers - breakfast? lunch? - hosted by some company, ideally in a regular location (prob. in downtown Seattle or Pioneer Square) or in a rotating location.
Get-togethers would be 70% mingling, 30% presentation (probably from someone in the group) on an interesting topic - could be technical, could be managerial, could be look-at-the-industry. Assumption is that the content and topics are meant for hands-on leaders and are real-world, not stuff we’d read in a Gartner report if we read them anymore. Obviously interactive.
Assumption is that everything is under FrieNDA.

If you fit the description and would be interested enough to attend regularly, let me know (and if you have a preference b/w breakfast or lunch, or another bright idea, let me know that as well). There’s an “Email Me” link in the sidebar of scottru.com. I’ll likely host the first one in the next N weeks at WhitePages HQ in downtown Seattle (and probably could host regularly, we have a good space depending on size).

Jun

Velocity: Wikipedia Operations Talk

0 Comments Categories: Velocity08

A few interesting notes from the Wikipedia talk, which for my money was the most interesting ops talk of the conference so far, from a Wikipedia engineer and trustee:

Lots of talk at the beginning about how many mistakes they make and how often an employee takes the site down. Refreshing, if strange, to hear such a perspective. Hard to find volunteers who aren’t too scared about breaking the site. (Mentioned later that there are 6 site engineers, two volunteer. All of them were in the room.)
An early graph showed that the % of non-cached data was a super-tiny % of all traffic: even with what’s no doubt a very sparse hit matrix, it seems like they’re able to cache just about everything.
The speaker didn’t know what their uptime was - he said (without prompting) “99 point something” - and very much said that “lots of nines” wasn’t a priority for them. He was an engineer and not a manager type, but it was still an interesting perspective - obsess over efficient use of non-profit resources (and people), not about high availability. This theme continues throughout the talk.
“I don’t know how important the last few seconds of changes” are - people can just re-enter the changes.
When the site goes down, their Gone Fishin’ page shows a donation box, and they make a huge amount of money. It’s the most profitable time. “It’s sometimes better to torture people.”
They have an external developer community, they like when they add features, but their optimization operator is // - be always ready to disable something. Heavy tasks get eliminated, delayed, reduced, and otherwise made smaller.
Some very funny/snarky comments, like pointing out how they split their database into multiple slaves based on use cases/languages, and then said something like “now that’s called sharding. We didn’t call it sharding, we just do things and then people come up with names for them.”
Uses Lucene for its search engine: since Lucene was based on Java, and Java wasn’t open-source friendly, they got it running on an open-source Java clone and on Mono (!). Now back to Lucene proper and very focused on keeping things open.
Every feature anyone builds needs to allow caching and think about invalidation. OK to think of the database as a cache if the in-memory cache hit rate will be very low. Memcached for an object cache with a lot of careful planning, aggressive Squid usage as an HTTP cache with a month-long TTL (and an app that purges outdated data), multiple layers and geographically distributed.
Have some old P4s that they won’t use b/c of their power usage and heat distribution. (We have some as well, but they aren’t sitting idle yet…)
Some crazy high numbers (80K SQL queries/sec, 50K pages/sec, >1TB of compressed revisions, etc.) that I didn’t catch - I’ll look for this talk and update it later.
“Please open source your stuff, so we can use it!”

All in all, a very memorable talk.

Jun

Velocity: Introducing Jiffy - Performance Tools for the Rest of Us

1 Comment Categories: Velocity08 and WhitePages

During my time at Amazon, I drank the performance obsession kool-aid. Geniuses like John did the hard-core data analysis to show that milliseconds matter to encourage customers to buy things. Using the great toolset Amazon had built for analyzing page performance, my teams worked to improve the response time at the average, the 99.9th percentile, etc.

Amazon’s challenges were very specific - pages were built by hundreds of service calls to hundreds of services across thousands of boxes, and so the page framework needed to be able to respond to failing or slowing services quickly, with appropriate backoff, etc. These were fun and heady problems to work on and follow.

When I left Amazon for WhitePages, I realized that the toolset I had grown to rely on both solved Amazon’s unique problems and were kept inside Amazon. I learned that other large companies had similar systems, and I could pay the usual suspects for some kinds of services, but there was nothing just off-the-shelf that could give me 10% of the information Amazon had.

Smaller web publishers, then, have the double-whammy of fewer tools to measure page performance and fewer engineers to build the tools to make that better.

That’s not right for the web, and so at WhitePages, we’ve built a toolset to help engineers build faster web sites, based on real-world data from real clients.

Today, we released that system as an open source project - Jiffy. Jiffy’s an end-to-end system for measuring page and component performance across real data.

I’ve blogged in detail on the WhitePages Developer Blog about Jiffy, and the code is immediately available for download. I announced the release at the O’Reilly Velocity conference this morning - here are the slides.

More to come about Velocity later, which has already had a few interesting moments, even if the room is very hard to make laugh. (I killed a few jokes before I started, likely a good call, since the ones I left fell flat.)

Jun

New Digs

0 Comments Categories: admin

So after 10 months on wordpress.com, I’m finally hanging out my own shingle and moving myself off of the comfortable, if cozy, environs of a locked-down (but spam-free) Wordpress installation.

I’ve started erecting some scaffolding here (don’t you need to see my last Tweet and other stuff I like? I think you do.) in time for Velocity. There’s still a good deal to be done: no idea if I’m going to keep anything - color scheme, theme, anything else. I’m impressed with Redoable so far, though.

In the meantime, everything I’ve written - about gnomedex, the iPhone, tech, and other nonsense - is (and will probably remain permanently) at scottru.wordpress.com.

I don’t even get a free favicon - there’s lots of work to do. Back soon!

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