"Engineering Culture"

The Origins of Amazon's Cloud Computing

I told Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM the actual origin of EC2. Chris Pinkham wanted to keep working from South Africa, and I, running ops at Amazon, was at first horrified by the idea.

“I was horrified at the thought of the dirty, public Internet touching MY beautiful operations.”

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?”