Infrastructure load for December 2013 and January 2014

(Context: In case people missed this transition, my last day at Mozilla was Dec31, so obviously, I’m not going to be doing these monthly infrastructure load posts anymore. I started this series of posts in Jan2009, because the data, and analysis, gave important context for everyone in Mozilla engineering to step back and sanity-check the scale, usage patterns and overall health of Mozilla’s developer infrastructure. The data in these posts have shaped conversations and strategy within Mozilla over the years, so are important to continue. I want to give thanks to Armen for eagerly taking over this role from me during my transition out of Mozilla. Those of you who know Armen know that he’ll do this exceedingly well, in his own inimitable style, and I’m super happy he’s taken this on. I’ve already said this to Armen privately over the last few months of transition details, but am repeating here publicly for the record – thank you, Armen, for taking on the responsibility of this blog-post-series.)

December saw a big drop in overall load – 6,063 is our lowest load in almost half-a-year. However, this is no surprise given that all Mozilla employees were offline for 10-14 days out of the 31days – basically a 1/3rd of the month. At the rate people were doing checkins for the first 2/3rds of the month, December2013 was on track to be our first month ever over 8,000 checkins-per-month.

January saw people jump straight back into work full speed. 7,710 is our second heaviest load on record (slightly behind the current record 7,771 checkins in August2013).


Overall load since Jan 2009

Those are my quick highlights. For more details, you should go read Armen’s post for Dec2013 and post for Jan2014 yourself. He has changed the format a little, but the graphs, data and analysis are all there. And hey, Armen even makes the raw data available in html and json formats, so now you can generate your own reports and graphs if interested. A very nice touch, Armen.

John (still cheering from the sidelines).

“We are all remoties” @ Twilio

[UPDATE: The newest version of this presentation is here. joduinn 09nov2014]

(My life been hectic on several other fronts, so I only just now noticed that I never actually published this blog post. Sorry!!)

On 07-nov-2013, I was invited to present “We are all remoties” in Twilio’s headquarters here in San Francisco as part of their in-house tech talk series.
For context, its worth noting that Twilio is doing great as a company, which means they are hiring. And outgrowing their current space, so one option they were investigating was to keep the current space, and open up a second office elsewhere in the bay area. As they’d always been used to working in the one location, this “split into two offices” was top of everyone’s mind… hence the invitation from Thomas to give this company-wide talk about remoties.

Twilio’s entire office is a large, SOMA-style-warehouse-converted-into-open-plan-offices layout, packed with lots of people. The area I was to present in was their big “common area”, where they typically host company all-hand meetings, Friday socials and other big company-wide events. Quite, quite large. I’ve no idea how many people were there but it felt huge, and was wall-to-wall packed. The size gave an echo-y audio effect off the super-high high concrete ceilings and far-distant bare concrete walls, with a weird couple of structural pillars right in the middle of the room. Despite my best intentions, during the session, I found myself trying to “peer around” the pillars, aware of the people blocked from view.

Its great to see the response from folks when slides in a presentation *exactly* hit onto what is on top-of-their-minds. One section, about companies moving to multiple locations, clearly hit home with everyone… not too surprising, given the context. Another section, about a trusted employee moving out from office to start being a 100% remote employee, hit a very personal note – there was someone in the 2nd row who was a long-trusted employee actually about to embark on this exact change. He got quite the attention from everyone around him, and we stopped everything for a few minutes to talk about his exact situation. As far as I can tell, he found the entire session very helpful, but only time will tell how things work out for him.

The very great interactions, the lively Q+A, and the crowd of questions afterwards were all lots of fun and quite informative.

Big thanks to Thomas Wilsher @ Twilio for putting it all together. I found it a great experience, and the lively discussions before+during+after lead me to believe others did too.

John.
PS: For a PDF copy of the presentation, click on the smiley faces! For the sake of my poor blogsite, the much, much, larger keynote file is available on request.

(Update: fixed broken links. joduinn 26jun2014)