Category Archives: Events

Conferences, meetups, talks, and gatherings.

El Pais Interview

There has been a ton of media attention here at the blog conference in Spain. Friday and Saturday were a whirlwind of TV and newspaper interviews. The most in-depth, I believe, was from Pablo Fenandez in El Pais and is now available online in Spanish. There is something really special going on here in Spain with blogs, the people are full of such energy and passion that it’s definitely going to be a space to watch over the coming years.

MySQL Camp Google Notes

After speaking at Yahoo earlier, I drove a few miles down the street to Google for MySQL Camp. I caught the last session of the day, by Googlers saying how they used MySQL internal to Google. (I assume for the Adwords application.) Here are the stream-of-talking notes I took. The most fascinating bits I took out of it is how they take a partitioning/sharding strategy similar (but notably different in some ways) to WordPress.com and that they use DNS to manage all load balancing, high availability, datacenter failover, etc. DNS is a pretty powerful building block.

Continue reading MySQL Camp Google Notes

Web 2.0 Lies and Appearances

The Top 10 Lies of Web 2.0. I am in town, but I won’t be hanging around the Web 2.0 conference too much this week. However you can find me at Web 2.2 starting Thursday. (We’re a sponsor.) I’m giving a talk at Yahoo in Building B on Friday at 12 PM. (Bring food to throw.) Finally I’ll be at MySQL Camp this weekend. (Trying to figure out how to deal with thousands of queries a second across 50+ MySQL instances.) Update: Some folks thought this was a Web 2.0 diss, or an anti-Battelle/O’Reilly/etc statement. Not at all! I looped by the conference today and saw a lot of great folks, but it’s just not the best use of my time this year.

Microsoft CodeCamp

I’m still in Vienna, but this Saturday morning I’ll be at Silicon Valley CodeCamp speaking on How to say no. My Mom would be so proud. Extra: my keynote from Blogtalk is online at Google video. You may or may not be able to tell, but I was fighting keeping my eyes open (it was 5 AM for me). Next time I speak overseas I’m going to factor in an extra day ahead of time to adjust my sleep fully.

SLAs

When 100% is not 100%, this is related to one of the things I mentioned in my presentation yesterday at Future of Web Apps. You would think for how much they’re charging Rackspace could afford a less draconian interpretation of their “100%” promise, either that or they should invest more into their infrastructure.

WordCamp Wrapup

I'm still recovering from WordCamp in some ways, it was such a rush this week almost seems like a vacation. The best summary of posts regarding the event is on [gonzo]musings, The WordCamp 2006 Overview & Wrapup – from 7875 Miles Away. I'm very happy with how the event went, we had well over 300 brilliant and engaging make it a part of their day. There were a ton of great ideas and participation happening from all corners, especially the interaction during the State of the Word discussion. I also learned a ton and next year we will have a better sign-in process, naptime after BBQ, clearer tracks for devs vs. users, and a bit more lead time. Thank you so much to everyone who came out, it was a really magical day. Now I just need to figure out what to do with the 20 pounds of Memphis Minnie's brisket in my fridge.