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Adam Kalsey

This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

News and Commentary

LiveJournal Power-loss post-mortem

Freshness Warning
This blog post is over 19 years old. It's possible that the information you read below isn't current and the links no longer work.

23 Jan 2005

LiveJournal has a great write-up of what went wrong when their power failed last week. The article discusses exactly why it took so long to recover from the power problem and is a fantastic look at disaster recovery of a large-scale web application.

It’s not often you can find this sort of detailed account of the technology behind a web site of this scale. I’m reading it carefully to learn from their experience.

Recently Written

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Your Policies Aren’t Your Culture
Dec 13: Policies guide behavior, but culture is the lived norms and values of your team. Policies reflect culture -- they don’t define it. Netflix’s parental leave shift didn’t change its culture of freedom and responsibility. It clarified how to live it.
Lighten Your Process Burden
Dec 7: Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.
Product Add-Ons Are An Expansion Myth
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Protecting your Product Soul when the Same Product meets New People.
Nov 23: Expand into new markets while preserving your product’s core value. Discover how to adapt and grow without losing your product’s soul.
Building the Next Big Thing: A Framework for Your Second Product
Nov 19: You need a first product sooner than you think. Here's a framework for helping you identify a winner.
A Framework for Scaling product teams
Oct 9: The people, processes, and systems that make up a product organization change radically as you go through the stages of a company. This framework will guide that scaling.
My Networked Webcam Setup
Sep 25: A writeup of my network-powered conference call camera setup.

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