Mentions

The Do-Good Imperative

BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness covered my work at the seam between emergency response and technology, including the Velocity conference I co-founded.

“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.”

Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

Companion piece in BusinessWeek's CEO Guide to Disaster Readiness. I described navigating post-Katrina Louisiana on broken maps and what that says about crisis tooling.

“One of the interesting things with being a pretty senior technology person operating in a disaster is that you get to see the state of the art versus the state of the practice.”

Understanding Operations Culture (Part 1)

I wrote this in 2008 to define web operations culture using what I had learned from the fire service: the habits that separate teams who handle incidents well from teams who don't.

“You don't choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.”

Operations Is a Competitive Advantage (Secret Sauce for Startups!)

My 2007 O'Reilly Radar argument that operations is a competitive advantage for startups, and occasionally a strategic weapon. Comments thread includes Luke Kanies, John Allspaw, John Willis, and Steve Loughran.

You Become What You Disrupt

What happens when a disruptive technology wins a platform play and inherits the obligations of the system it replaced? I wrote this on O'Reilly Radar in 2007. The questions are still open.

“You become what you disrupt. What changes occur when you win a platform play, when you go from disruptive technology to a public utility?”