CrisisCamps and the Pattern of Disaster Technology Innovation

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 4

Over the past three years I have been working to bridge gaps between the tech community & traditional emergency management organizations.  I've focused on helping technologists adapt technologies to support humanitarian missions, often in response to a disaster.  
After Hurricane Katrina, Mikel Maron and I discovered a pattern for successful innovation during and after disasters.  Understanding this pattern is crucial to "Serving Those that Serve Others".
Pattern for DisasterTech Innovation 1. Disaster2. Ad-Hoc Adaptation 3. Championship 4. Iterative Improvement
There is an unprecedented amount of interest and attention in finding ways to help in Haiti & around the world.  The CrisisCamp & CrisisCommon projects are coordinating events and helping match organizations with needs to volunteers with skills.  I encourage you to participate, and volunteer your time, knowledge, and resources.  
Serve those that serve others.  You can make a difference now.

Upcoming Crisis Camps

• Sunday, January 24, 2010
• CrisisCamp Haiti, Toronto
• Saturday, January 30, 2010
• CrisisCamp Haiti, New York
• CrisisCamp Haiti, Chicago
• CrisisCamp Haiti, Montreal
• Sunday, January 31, 2010
• CrisisCamp Haiti, Washington DC
• CrisisCamp Haiti, New York (day 2)

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Velocity 2010: Fast By Default

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 3

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...

Fast isn't a Feature. Fast is a Requirement.

At Velocity earlier this year Marissa Meyer explained why performance mattered so much to Google. Then Eric Schurman (Bing & Velocity Program Committee member) and Jake Brutlag (Google Search) made history with a co-presentation on just how crucial performance is to revenue .

Phil Dixon of Shopzilla explained that a 5 second performance improvement increased their revenue by 7-12 percent while reducing hardware spend by 50%!!!

Fast means Client, Server, Infrastructure, Operations, & Organizations

Getting to Fast isn't just about any one part of the system. Browser & Client performance is crucial, and requires an equally fast server & infrastructure to support it. When load increases, infrastructure must scale quickly or performance suffers. The operational tools and processes for managing software & infrastructure must support rapid changes in a dynamic environment, and be backed by an organization & culture that embraces it.

We're Looking for Speakers - Submit your Proposals Now!

Do you have ideas and experience for improving Web Performance & Operations and making things "Fast by Default"? We want you as a speaker at Velocity 2010.

Submit your Proposals Now! Entires are due no later than January 11th, 2010 at 11:59 PM Pacific.

One more thing...

Quite a few people have asked us to have Velocity conferences more frequently & beyond the SF Bay Area, and so we're going to try something new. On December 8 we'll be running our first ever Velocity Online Conference.

Past Velocity Conference participants get a 50% discount & get a 25% discount off Velocity 2010.

See the full schedule after the jump...

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More on how web performance impacts revenue...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 10

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.

What about smaller websites that aren't yet at this scale?

Alistair Croll and Sean Power, the authors of the new book Complete Web Monitoring, have continued this research for sites at smaller scale.

They used a Strangeloop Networks web acceleration appliance to optimize half the sessions to a smaller production website, tagging optimized and unoptimized visitors so they could be analyzed in Google Analytics. The Strangeloop device applies many of Steve Souders' performance rules to an existing site automatically (a kind of "Steve-in-a-Box" ;-).

The results of their analysis show how significant a reduction in page latency can be. In addition to reducing bounce rates, and increasing pages per visit & time on site, they found a 16.07% increase in conversion rates and a 5.50% increase in average order value.

Check out the full post on the Watching Websites blog.

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

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

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 from Data Center Knowledge reminds us that this is just the latest in a series of major attacks.

Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

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 its entirety:

Note: Other videos from Velocity are being posted to VelocityConference.blip.tv

Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd - Submit your talks now!

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar.

The deadline for talks is May 11th, so submit your talks now!

As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for fun geek topics like hacks, how-to's, and insights. (Talks don't have to be Velocity-related!) If you're not sure what an Ignite talk looks like check out the Ignite Show.

You can RSVP for the event on Upcoming or Facebook.

CrisisCamp is June 12-14th in Washington, DC

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

CrisisCamp is an unconference to bring together domain experts, hackers, makers, developers, and first responders to improve technology and practice for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief. This is the first event in what I hope will become a movement, and it's happening on June 12 - 14, 2009 in Washington, DC.

Across the world, everyday people can find themselves in crisis. Whether for a day, a month or a continued state of social distress, citizens across the world have common needs for communication. We want to connect with our loved ones to let them know that we are okay (or that we need help) and we crave information by which we make decisions within that time or place of crisis. We want to let people know they they are not alone, that people across the world care and seek to act act altruistically to provide resources to aid in the crisis recovery.

CrisisCamp seeks to break down the bifurcation between international and domestic humanitarian relief agencies and unite their efforts to share lessons learned, response tools, and expertise to encourage citizen engagement and use of information communications technologies (ICTs) to aid in crisis recovery, wherever people need help. We have great hopes that with a successful CrisisCamp, we can inspire a global effort to mitigate the potential impact of times or places of crisis on the human condition.

Crisis Camp seeks participation by anyone who wishes to help. We are especially interested in the use of ICTs in developing countries, especially in the areas of access, usability, and innovation. We seek to learn from academic findings on citizen participation, needs and problem solving efforts. In addition, we seek to understand global information needs through a consumer approach, because people will use what is available and familiar if a crisis event occurs. And finally, we want to know how ICTs, in all their uses, can help citizens of all abilities, recover during a time or place of crisis.

CrisisCamp Ignite! Session Kick Off

Time: Friday, June 12, 2009 from 7:30-9PM
Location: The World Bank,1818 H St., NW Washington D.C.
Participate: Sign up at CrisisCampIgnite (separate registration required for World Bank entry)

CrisisCamp - Saturday, June 13 & Sunday, June 14th

Start Time: 9:00am both days
Location: The Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet @ George Washington University Participate: Sign up at CrisisCamp

Time Lapse of Galactic Center of Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 25

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman.

According to William Castleman: The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were 20 seconds at f/2.8 ISO 1600 followed by 40 second interval. Exposures were controlled by an interval timer shutter release (Canon TC80N3). Power was provided by a Hutech EOS203 12v power adapter run off a 12v deep cycle battery. Large jpg files shot in custom white balance were batch processed in Photoshop (levels, curves, contrast, Noise Ninja noise reduction, resize) and assembled in Quicktime Pro. Editing/assembly was with Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9.

[via the Primary Tentacle @ Laughing Squid]

Space Shuttle Atlantis during Solar Transit

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 6

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D Mark II digital camera. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault)

You can see more of Thierry's fine work at: www.astrophoto.fr

from nasa hq photostream [via slashdot]

Velocity 2009 - Big Ideas (early registration deadline)

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 7

My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: "What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?"

While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part of the Internet from the client browser & operating system, DNS, through the network, to load balancers, servers, services, storage, down to the operating system & hardware, and all the way back again to the browser. It requires an understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP, & SSL deep enough to describe how connections are managed, how load-balancers work, and how certificates are exchanged and validated... and that's just the first request!

Web Performance & Operations is an emerging discipline which requires incredible breadth, focusing less on specific technologies and more on how the entire system works together. While people often specialize on particular components, great engineers always think of that component in relation to the whole. The best engineers are able to fly to the 50,000 foot view and see the entire system in motion and then zoom in to microscopic levels and examine the tiny movements of an individual part.

John Allspaw recently described this interconnectedness on his blog:

With websites, the introduction of change (for example, a bad database query) can affect (in a bad way) the entire system, not just the component(s) that saw the change. Adding handfuls of milliseconds to a query that’s made often, and you’re now holding page requests up longer. The same thing applies to optimizations as well. Break that [bad] query into two small fast ones, and watch how usage can change all over the system pretty quickly. Databases respond a bit faster, pages get built quicker, which means users click on more links, etc. This second-order effect of optimization is probably pretty familiar to those of us running sites of decent scale.

Working with these systems requires an understanding not only of the way technology interacts, but the way that people do as well. The structure, operation, and development of a website mirrors the organization that creates it, which is why so many people in WebOps focus on understanding and improving management culture & process.

Organizing a conference like Velocity is a wonderful challenge because it requires the same sort of thinking. We focus on the big concepts that everyone needs to know and then go deep into the technologies that change our understanding of the system. We find ways to share the unique experience that can only be gained by operating at scale. We make it safe to share as much of the "Secret Sauce" as we can.

Please join us at Velocity this year, we have an amazing lineup of speakers & participants. Early registration ends on Monday, May 11th at 11:59 PM Pacific. (Radar readers can use "vel09cmb" for an additional 15% discount.)

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