"webops" entries
Paging systems and Conference Bridges for startups & small teams
Early registration for the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference has opened. To help spread the word, I’ve written this “simplest thing that will work” hack to a common Operations need: Paging systems and Conference Bridges. Step 1: Establish a team contact list with SMS email addresses Create a Google Spreadsheet to create a team roster like this one. My…
Steve Souders asks: “How green is your web page?”
Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…
Steve Souders asks: "How green is your web page?"
Steve Souders, my Velocity conference Co-Chair and author of High Performance Websites, gave me permission to repost this great analysis: How green is your web page? Writing faster web pages is great for your users, which in turn is great for you and your company. But it’s better for everyone else on the planet, too. Intrigued by an article on…
Today's ETech Hack is Tomorrow's Critical Infrastructure…
My friend Jordan Schwartz just gave me the perfect example of how quickly a cool hack can turn into Critical Infrastructure. Jordan wrote "How to build an SMS Service" and created SwaggleSMS as a demonstration of how to do group chat with SMS. It's a hack that he created as an experiment (it's super-useful for conference afterparty coordination). Jordan…
WebOps Hack #1: Simple Availability Report for Busy Teams
I created this spreadsheet for tracking availability and "days since last outage". Along with the availability and uptime calculations, it asks the following questions: What broke? Why? What fixed It? What did we learn? How can we prevent recurrence? Who owns follow-up? I've found this to be the "simplest thing that could possibly work" for identifying problems and tracking issues…
Operations is a competitive advantage… (Secret Sauce for Startups!)
My lunchtime conversations at the Summit centered around Operations as a competitive advantage (and occasionally a "strategic weapon"). This advantage is the ability to consistently create and deploy reliable software to an unreliable platform that scales horizontally. Many people think of Operations as "a bunch of boring work… which I'm hoping someone else is doing." It often takes less…
Failure Happens: A summary of the power outage at 365 Main
Datacenter provider 365 Main released their initial report from Tuesday's power failure which affected Craigslist, Technorati, Yelp, TypePad, LiveJournal, Vox, and others. This outage is an excellent example of complex systems failure, and so I'll be using it as the basis for my next few posts on Operations. This is my own analysis using publicly available data. The 365main site…