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)
Note: I'm not taking the blog down, it will exist as it is in a state of suspended animation.
ReplyDeleteAw, man! Best of luck in your new gig, and I'm sorry to see the blog simmer down.
ReplyDeleteAt National Instruments, we found it invaluable; you did a great job of collecting key information on transparency in one place. We set up a Stashboard-based public health dashboard and patterned our downtime communication after your guidance and have seen great reaction from our users. Thanks very much for the work you did here, it came in very useful.
Don't be a stranger though, if you happen across cool transparency stuff and have a spare minute, do post more.
Lenny, thanks for all the work on transparency on this blog and I wish you an exciting time at your new venture. Do let us know what it entails once you can tell us more!
ReplyDeleteIt would be a pity to leave this blog in a "state of suspended animation" as you say. Although quite useful as a reference as is, it would be great if you could updated it with more posts about transparency on uptime and performance.
We have been working on transparency for quite a while too with our customers, inspired by dashboards of Google, Amazon and others, and implemented transparency dashboards at companies and organisations like Twitter, Bit.ly, Wordpress, Wikipedia, and many more. I also wrote an article on this subject recently at Readwriteweb: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sponsor_post_transparency_is_critical_when_sites_fail.php doing a bit of missionary work ourselves.
A thought: how about transforming this blog just a bit and make it into a platform for more stories, examples, and views that many people contribute to?
I'd be happy to be a co-editor, keep list of examples (status pages, post mortems by companies, technologies) or write some posts now and then, whatever is useful.
Others could join in too to keep it an ongoing and lively blog. Would that work?
Stan P. van de Burgt
CEO
WatchMouse
Stan, email me at lennysan at gmail so we can talk.
ReplyDeleteAny word on this? We'd be happy to submit a case study to an "open" transparent uptime blog!
ReplyDeleteLenny,
ReplyDeleteamazing blog, Syntenic would love to sponsor if this helps keep it active
Ian
@theagileadmin: There are a few things in the works, stay tuned...
ReplyDelete@Ian: Interesting offer...lets talk offline