As a leader of a technical operations team I often have to work on technical operations engineer hiring. This process involves a lot of interviews with candidates and during those interviews along with many challenging practical questions I really love to ask questions like “What are the most important resources you think an Operations Engineer should follow?”, “What books in your opinion are must-read for a techops engineer?” or “Who are your personal heroes in IT community?”. Those questions often give me a lot of information about candidates, their experience, who they are looking up to in the community, what they are interested in, and if they are actively working on improving their professional level.

Recently, one of the candidates asked me to share my lists with him and I thought this information could be valuable to other people so I have decided to share it here on my blog.

Must-Read Books List

First …

This is a personal account of my effort to clean up my web presence. My web pages of personal and semi-professional nature needed weeding, and I ended up moving from sporadically maintained multi-lingual blogs and manually edited HTML pages to a set of Google Sites. Generations of cruft are being superseded by a solution based on a weighted balance of contemporary ease of use, versatility and my limited available time.

Before joining MySQL AB in 2001, I had lived through a set of personal web pages that I had set up with PHP. My mental mode was one of combining some fun PHP coding, a bit of editing of pics, and manual uploading of HTML files with scp with emacs editing on the server, that I hosted at my then-employer Polycon Ab. Once at MySQL, I continued in the same mode, but from 2005 onwards started blogging on …

Phew, here we go, this blog post has been long time coming! A few months ago I started toying around with the idea of analyzing the PlanetMySQL public blog feed. It doesn’t take long to extract the data and prepare it for analysis but between lots of work and procrastination this blog post was left unfinished.

It was partly out of pure curiosity and partly the fact that it seemed to me there were less posts than previous years that I decided to trend out the number of posts over the past years and here we go.

The blue line shows the blog posts per month over the past six years and the black line is a polynomial trend line. There are a few points of interest which are visible and I’ll be listing here (to all their understanding):
1. The first thing which struck me negatively is …

A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. …

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the three Baltic countries for Sun Microsystems, talking about MySQL powering the Web economy. The tour started on Monday and Tuesday in Vilnius, Lithuania, followed by Riga on Wednesday and Tallinn on Thursday. Many similarities between the countries, which are externally often seen as one unit and which internally sometimes view each other as siblings.

I was joined during the trip by Dutch Sun colleague Martin de Jong, who observed that each of the countries have a larger area than the Netherlands, whereas the combined .lt .lv and .ee population isn’t even half of that of the Netherlands.

But the economic importance of the Baltics is increasing. The Sun Microsystems activities are being managed through Sun Finland, whose country manager …

Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through …

Hey all,

I hear that the collective "you" are annoyed by all of the technical bits on this blog. So I've decided to move non-personal blog entries to my movable type server at mt.colliertech.org. Specifically, work blog posts will be made to

http://colliertech.org/~cjcollier/mysql/

If this works well and I start making lots of posts, I will have the planet mysql aggregator point to the new atom feed:

http://mt.colliertech.org/mysql/atom.xml

good fun, that. For those of you who don't read this blog to get new and juicy bits of information about MaxDB and MySQL, rest assured that posts to this blog will now be easier to consume :)

Hey all,

I hear that the collective "you" are annoyed by all of the technical bits on this blog. So I've decided to move non-personal blog entries to my movable type server at mt.colliertech.org. Specifically, work blog posts will be made to

http://colliertech.org/~cjcollier/mysql/

If this works well and I start making lots of posts, I will have the planet mysql aggregator point to the new atom feed:

http://mt.colliertech.org/mysql/atom.xml

good fun, that. For those of you who don't read this blog to get new and juicy bits of information about MaxDB and MySQL, rest assured that posts to this blog will now be easier to consume :)