« September 30, 2002 | Main | October 02, 2002 »
October 01, 2002
An Abundance Mentality
Brent Ashley reacted to my post on Jeremy:
Phil Windley, blogging CIO of the State of Utah, admires Jeremy Zawodny's sharing. I do too.
I've noticed with myself though, that my sharing-ness tends to rise and fall with my sense of security. When I've got lots of business and no worries, I'm a veritable sharing phenom, but my willingness to participate and to share has dropped considerably this year since I've been more interested in finding enough paying business to get by.
Brent makes a good point. Blogging requires what is called an "abundance mentality." If you don't approach it with the mental attitude that there's plenty to go around, you're less likely to share, which is at the heart of blogging. The cynical side of me wonders if this might not be blogging's fatal flaw: it requires a fair amount of altruistic behavior.
On the other hand, I've observed that having an abundance mentality is crucial to a high performance organization. Leaders don't need to cultivate an abundance mentality to promote blogging, they need to promote an abundance mentality because that how you create an organization that works. The lack of an abundance mentality leads to an organization that doesn't communicate, doesn't act like a team, and eventually doesn't accomplish very much.
People without an abundance mentality spend a lot of their time at work angry at their boss, resentful of their co-workers, and feeling like every suggestion of change is an attack on them personally. Many would say that the environment plays a role there and I whole-heartedly agree that we need to create work environments that foster an abundance mentality, but that doesn't remove the responsibility on each employee to ask themselves why they cash their pay check and whether they're part of the solution or part of the problem.
06:51 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Google Search Appliance and Outsourcing
Infoworld reports that Google has released a bigger, beefier version of their search appliance. The new search engine extends "the search capabilities to 3 million documents and 150 queries per minute." We probably don't need 150 queries per minute, but we definitely have that many documents or more. The new appliance also uses a clustering approach to HA. This sort of support needs to be added to our web infrastructure platform that McNamee is working on.
We use an internally developed search engine right now. Its actually a great piece of work, but we have a tough time keeping up due to all the other work that needs to get done. I'm often asked if I'm a supporter of outsourcing. The answer in general is "no." I think IT is too important to an organization to turn it over lock, stock, and barrel to an outsider. I'm am, however, in favor of "oursourcing" any internal development that can be replaced by off the shelf purchasing so that those resources can be turned to other important activities.
I learned this lesson the hard way in a prior life when we'd built a large system based on CORBA before application servers were widely used or understood (at least by me). We spent a lot of time working on distribution code, load balancing, error recovery, threading, etc. After a while we just retooled the system, bought Weblogic and solved most of our headaches. In the end, there was no way a handful of guys in my shop could come close to keeping up with the development staff Weblogic had placed on the problem and the price of the software was well worth having my guys working on product development rather than infrastructure tweaking.
09:59 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Zawodny on MySQL, Operating Systems, and Threads
Jeremy Zawodny is the head MySQL guy at Yahoo!. He writes a blog that is very informative on system engineering issues. In this post Jeremy discusses the differences in threading on Linux and FreeBSD and its effect on MySQL. You should note the following:
- The level of detail that someone putting high performance systems needs to understand about multiple, complex systems and their interactions.
- The kinds of analysis and tools that he uses.
- That there isn't a single right answer. There are lots of "it depends" and compromises.
Zawodny is intelligent, dedicated to his craft, and, I'm sure, well compensated. What's more, he's willing to share his insights regularly on his blog. My hat's off to him.