You're invited: Valley leaders to attend Water-Energy-SmartTech conference

Sustainable Silicon Valley is gearing up for its next big event, the WEST Summit (Water Energy Smart Technology), and you're invited. SSV is offering a special discount of 20% on registration for colleagues and friends—and that includes readers of this blog. WEST will be held at Stanford University in conjunction with the Woods Center for the Environment on Dec. 6, and will feature the launch of the project I've been working on: EcoCloud™, a collaborative, social website enabling decision-makers, vendors, business leaders, and researchers to share knowledge and build alliances in order to create a sustainable industrial ecology in the Bay Area.

Attendees will include key decision makers from across the sustainability ecosystem, including state and local governments, municipal utilities (Santa Clara, San Jose, Sunnyvale, etc.), tech firms (IBM, SAP, Google, Intel, etc.), academia (Stanford, SJSU, etc.), civic organizations (Wholly H2O, EDF, etc.), entrepreneurs, and VCs.

The day-long event features workshops, expert panel discussions, a lively exposition, and lunch. The goal of the WEST Summit, in the words of SSV's Executive Director, is "to catalyze a sea change in action towards long-term resiliency in Silicon Valley through the distributed management of our water and energy supply. It will be a pivotal opportunity to build relationships with local business and community leaders already taking action on the important nexus between water and energy usage."

The event registration is http://west-summit2010.eventbrite.com/ and the discount code is "GOWEST"

Site Reliability Engineers at Google profiled by student blogger

In Caitlin Talks to Site Reliability, you can get a peek into the daily routine of one of the teams I worked with when I first started at Google. These engineers are constantly at work behind the scenes, turning dials and pulling levers to make Google's incredible infrastructure work smoothly. We're talking about software that runs near the bottom of the stack, 'way below the Gmail or Calendar UI that you see: file systems, job allocators, and everything else that is just one step above datacenter hardware.

I helped the SREs by capturing what had previously been purely verbal lore: grilling them for troubleshooting tips, writing down day-to-day procedures, and creating training for new team members. I created web pages explaining SRE's habits and requirements to other teams at Google so that they could all work together nicely. I also (gently) corralled the SRE team into adopting some documentation best practices so that when I left them, they could continue to record their knowledge for the benefit of their colleagues.

Caitlin's interview subject, Marc the SRE, talks mostly about being on call and getting late-night pages to fix issues. That's the dramatic part of the job, but from where I sat, I saw the SREs labor constantly (and, mostly, patiently) to make already-up-and-running infrastructure run better, faster, and at ever-larger scale. New systems constantly replaced the old, requiring reshuffling and reconfiguration. Engineers on product development teams had to be educated about how to use the infrastructure appropriately—the danger of knocking over your own or another team's product was a real and ever-present threat.

It was an interesting job trying to pin all this down in words. Even today, when I get the "unavailable, try again in 30s..." message, I picture the SREs scrambling for all they're worth. I'm still amazed at how fast they get these things repaired. I like to think my documentation plays some small part in it, but the truth is, I learned a lot more from them than they did from me.

Sustainable SV: top Bay Area firms, government, & universities ... and me!

Just got involved with an outfit called Sustainable Silicon Valley. They have existed for some years, but recently got a very energetic new Executive Director, who I met at a Halloween party (the benefits of stirring about!). Their mission, simply stated, is to make industry safe for the planet by creating a regional model of what "sustainable" really looks like—then exporting it to other regions in the U.S. and internationally. Needless to say, such a grand mission has me totally inspired.

They are launching a new community website chock-full of social features (not the one linked above; it's still under wraps), and my experience working with very large-scale collaborative authoring at Google is enabling me to give them some advice about how to allow many people to contribute content to their site without having it devolve into total chaos. Their site is based on Ning, but they are really pushing its capabilities in some interesting directions. The Ning team might be fatigued by all our questions about how to customize their platform, but (if you guys are reading this) I hope they will agree that the results are entirely worth the effort.

Google Launches Apps Marketplace Developer Community

Google has launched a new community site for one of the projects I worked on, the Apps Marketplace. It's nice to see them encouraging more collaboration among their dev users. Before this community site existed, I wrote some of the Apps Marketplace content on Google Codesite, including the Developer's Overview and Gmail Contextual Gadgets Developer's Guide. That last project was blogged about all over the place right after its launch at the 2010 Google I/O conference (Google Steals Hotmail's Thunder was a particularly fun one). It has been amazing to be involved with helping 3rd-party developers create and sell (or give away!) cool apps that integrate with Google Apps like Gmail and Calendar.