Velocity 2012 Postmortem

2012-06-29 16:23:23 by jdixon

This week I traveled out west for my first Velocity conference as an attendee. I went out two years ago but I was so busy juggling exhibitor duties that I didn't get to enjoy any hallway networking or formal session. This year I went in with plans to catch as many sessions as possible, particularly those skewed towards monitoring, trending and operations workflow. As expected, I skipped quite a few talks but made up for it with a lot of quality time catching up with peers and reviewing new technologies (and philosophies) in the DevOps space.

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New Year's Resolutions

2010-01-01 22:28:02 by jdixon

I'm not sure how effective it is to post these here, but I'm hopeful that having them in cyberspace will help keep me motivated. I'm hereafter calling these goals rather than resolutions The latter, to me, implies something that you begin immediately. This cold-turkey approach virtually guarantees failure. The moment you trip up, the subconscious immediately considers them a lost cause and reverts to the old behavior. As goals, I think it sets a more optimistic tone and allows me to gradually adapt the preferred conduct.

Without further ado, my personal list of goals for this year (in no particular order)...

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Your Mom is Crazy

2009-08-24 11:37:37 by jdixon

When people ask you what you do for a living, do you answer "geek"? While shopping for a new car, is your primary criteria "good, fast, cheap... pick two"? Did you get goosebumps the first time you played with VMware's virtual switching/VLAN support? If so, you might be a perfect fit for our team.

OmniTI is looking for someone with real UNIX chops. We have a passion for what we do and it shows. A typical day in the Ops team is a heaping pile of scalability, smothered with resiliency, and a smattering of optimization. We eat and drink Open Source. We poop cold steel. You will be tempered, and you'll love every minute of it. If this sounds like your sort of thing, shoot me a line so we can talk.

P.S. We're the place your mom warned you about.

Fore!

2009-08-19 12:24:19 by jdixon

Sometimes we all have difficult days. The alarm goes off at 5am for an early start. Traffic is a bitch. Hardware breaks, data corrupts, services lockup, drives fill up and servers crash. Co-workers disagree and people yell. The pager likes the sound of its own voice.

Once in a while, these days happen. We forge through them with a restless eye at the clock, waiting for it to be over. At the conclusion, can we look in the mirror and be proud of our efforts, or is there regret for the should'ves? It's hard to be passionate every day. When the cogs are aligned and the ship runs smoothly, passion stokes our fire and gives flight to new ideas. But a foul day can quickly drain our passion and result in poor judgment and apathy.

I used to play golf a lot. When I worked the graveyard shift, I routinely teed off at the end of my day. While most of the other golfers feared the dreaded sand-trap, I reveled in the opportunity. The chance to easily "save out" and focus on the next hole. Being able to meet these obstacles as opportunities adjusts our perception and can inspire us to greater heights.

Noit Grows Hair on Your Chest

2009-08-15 14:09:13 by jdixon

Todd Hoff over at High Scalability takes a look at Reconnoiter. He went through the [currently] arduous task of installing and configuring it manually; setting up checks can be a hairy experience. But the end result seems to justify the initial pain. It's a very exciting (and useful) application that will only get better as the #noit devs continue to hack on it.

As an Ops guy over at OmniTI, I've been fortunate to watch Reconnoiter's incubation process. Theo Schlossnagle is probably one of the smartest guys in this industry and he gets scalability issues. We've batted around ideas about network trend and analysis tools before (e.g. NFDB) so naturally I'm anxious to see where Noit takes us.