Back in the salad days of the 1990’s, I was working at a company that was building the hot product of the day: an intranet. Every company wanted an intranet. We’d built several for different client before deciding to create a white labelable intranet that would be the delight of all our customers. Give us some money and we’d give you a themed intranet with calendaring, project tracking, task management and more.…
Sometime in early 2013, I was really struggling with writing Storm Applied. I felt stymied at every turn by the requests of our editor. He was always asking us to explain simple topics more deeply. I almost lost my mind when a request to explain “web-scale” came up. It all felt like Manning was having us dumb the book down. Here we were trying to write an “advanced” book and we were running around explaining obvious, simple topics.…
Almost two years ago, I embarked on a project that I had no idea the immensity of. And today, it has finally led to this: It started with my bugging Matt Jankowski to write a “mea culpa” blog post about our problems getting going with Storm at TheLadders. The idea was to start with a “boy we didn’t know what we were doing” post and continue on with a series of posts about running Storm in a production.…
Imagine for a moment that you are on a small development team tasked with core operations at a moderate sized startup. You’re responsible for the development, operations and maintenance of various production systems. Your day is filled with all the fun of programming combined with the joys of running a distributed system. You’ve just entered a room with the rest of your teammates to discuss what tools you’ll be using to build your latest system.…
I recently did an interview with the news aggregator site lobste.rs. It covers some of what I’ve been up to in my role as Principal Architect at TheLadders, as well as some info about my forthcoming book Storm Applied.…