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.
Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd – Submit your talks now!
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…
Time Lapse of Galactic Center of Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party
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.”
Space Shuttle Atlantis during Solar Transit
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…
Velocity 2009 – Big Ideas (early registration deadline)
(tag cloud created from Velocity session & speaker information using wordle.net) 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…
AT&T Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!
The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact. What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below: From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why…
It's Really Just a Series of Tubes
Molly Wright Steenson hit the Ignite jackpot at Etech this year with her explanation of the steam powered network of pneumatic tubes of the 1800s. If you’re someone that, like me, has a [somewhat obsessive relationship with Internet Infrastructure](http://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity), you must watch this talk.
Understanding Web Operations Culture – the Graph & Data Obsession
We’re quite addicted to data pr0n here at Flickr. We’ve got graphs for pretty much everything, and add graphs all of the time. -John Allspaw, Operations Engineering Manager at Flickr & author of The Art of Capacity Planning One of the most interesting parts of running a large website is watching the effects of unrelated events affecting user traffic…
Data Center Power Efficiency
James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft’s Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many…