All good things...must come to an end

After nearly two and half years, over one hundred posts, a presentation at Velocity 2010, a quote in the Wall Street Journal, an O'Reilly webinar, and immeasurable friendships, connections, and opportunities that have come as result of this blog, I am (sadly) putting the blog on indefinite hiatus. As of next week, I will be leaving my job (of nearly 10 years) and pursuing my dream of starting my own company. In that new world I do not foresee having the time necessary to give this blog the time it deserves, and so to avoid leaving it in a state of perpetual uncertainty, this will be my final post.

It saddens me to bring this site to an end. I've gotten more out of it than I could have ever hoped. Reading over my first post (as painful as that is), I am happy to see that I have met the goals I set out for myself. Things have come a long way since those days, but there is still far more to do. My biggest hope is that you as a reader have gained some nugget of useful knowledge out of my writings, and that you continue to push forward on the basic ideas of transparency, openness, and simply helping your company act more human.

In regards to my startup, I don't have a lot of details to share just yet, but if you are interested in staying up to date please follow me on twitter or LinkedIn. I can also give you my personal email address if you would like to contact me for any reason. All I can say at this point is that I will be moving to one and only city of Montreal to work with the wonderful folks at Year One Labs. Mysterious eh?

Below is a list of my favorite (and most popular) posts from the past 2+ years:

• Why Transparency Works
• The Benefits of Transparency
• The Tao of Web Performance and Uptime
• A Guideline for Postmortem Communication
• 7 Keys to a Successful Public Health Dashboard
• Comprehensive review of SaaS SLAs - A sad state of affairs
• Google App Engine downtime postmortem, nearly a perfect model for others
• As Amazon goes down, good case study of consumer-facing transparency (or lack thereof)
• The Upside of Downtime (slides)
• How to Trust the Cloud (slides)
• The top 7 most overused cloud metaphors, sorted by weather pattern

Note: If you are doing anything similar that you think readers of this blog would find useful, please let me know in the comments and I'll update this post.

Signing off,
Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan, LinkedIn)