Jesse Robbins

Jesse Robbins (@jesserobbins) is CEO of Opscode and a recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

He serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar. Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

Happy SysAdmin Appreciation Day!

Did you do anything on the web today? Thank a SysAdmin.

If you are reading this (or any other) page, sending a message, watching a video, reading an email, or doing anything else that touches the web, you can thank a SysAdmin.

What Facebook's Open Compute Project means

Open Compute could be a big step forward for infrastructure, ops, and the web.

Jesse Robbins says Facebook's Open Compute Project represents a giant step for open source hardware, for the evolution of the web and cloud computing, and for infrastructure and operations in general.

Creating cultural change

At Velocity 2010, John Rauser presented four funny and powerful examples of cultural change, from a campaign at his office to get people to fill the coffee pot after taking the last cup, to an award winning advertising campaign. This talk explains how to "sneak past people's mental filters" and make things happen….

Velocity Culture: Web Operations, DevOps, etc…

Velocity 2010 is happening on June 22-24 (right around the corner!). This year we’ve added third track, Velocity Culture, dedicated to exploring what we’ve learned about how great teams and organizations work together to succeed at scale.

Web Operations, or WebOps, is what many of us have been calling these ideas for years. Recently the term “DevOps” has become a kind of rallying cry that is resonating with many, along with variations on Agile Operations.

CrisisCamps and the Pattern of Disaster Technology Innovation

Over the past three years Jesse Robbins has been working to bridge gaps between the tech community and traditional emergency management organizations.

Velocity 2010: Fast By Default

We’re entering our third year of Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference. Velocity 2010 will be June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara, CA. It’s going to be another incredible year. Steve Souders & I have set a new theme this year, “Fast by Default”. We want the broader Velocity community & to adopt it as a shared mission & mantra. The reason for this is simple.

More on how web performance impacts revenue…

At Velocity this year Microsoft, Google and Shopzilla each presented data on how web performance directly impacts revenue. Their data showed that slow sites get fewer search queries per user, less revenue per visitor, fewer clicks, fewer searches, and lower search engine rankings. They found that in some cases even after site performance was improved users continued to interact as if it was slow. Bad experiences have a lasting influence on customer behavior.

John Adams on Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World’s Most Popular Micro-blogging Site

Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams’ exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter. Good luck today John & team… I know it’s going to be a long day! Update: Apparently Facebook & Livejournal have had similar attacks today. Rich Miller…

John Adams on Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site

Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams’ exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter. Good luck today John & team… I know it’s going to be a long day! Update: Apparently Facebook & Livejournal have had similar attacks today. Rich Miller…

Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture

We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft. Here is his keynote in it’s entirety…