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Zen and the Art of Apache Maintenance
SilentBob4 writes "Apache recently held a week-end "infrathon" to sweep the dust out of the corners, squash a few old bugs, drink a wee bit of ale (maybe a wee bit more than a wee bit) and get their hands dirty with the Zen of maintaining their infrastructure. MadPenguin.org crashed the party in search of the secrets of getting into the "zone" while peeking into the grittiest of the nitty gritty with one of the darling projects of open source, Apache." From the article: "The guys that I interviewed were among some of the brightest minds in open source; Brian Behlendorf; Upayavira; Greg Stein; and Roy Fielding, all of whom are well known and regarded (or deserve to be). These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires, but instead flew thousands of miles to sit slouching on couches and squatting on cushions hacking infrastructure maintenance for free, primarily just to hang out with each other, even though they could have done the same thing on line."
...like Lego toilets.
Really fascinating stuff, but I couldn't help mysef:
From the interview with Brian Behlendorf:
MP: What's the most important thing about this event?
BB: I'm not sure this is an event worthy of Slashdot [laughing]
Heh, you must be new here.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
I was going to reply but instead but instead I'm sitting in my comfy chair typing this somewhat unfunny comment for free.
...for all your hard "work"
BB: I'm not sure this is an event worthy of Slashdot [laughing].
/. Your event stands a good chance of being posted two or three times over the next month.
Don't you worry yourself about what's worthy of
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
Apache recently held a week-end "infrathon" to sweep the dust out of the corners, squash a few old bugs, drink a wee bit of ale (and maybe a wee bit more than a wee bit) and get their hands dirty with the Zen of maintaining their infrastructure. MadPenguin.org crashed the party in search of the secrets of getting into the "zone" while peeking into the grittiest of the nitty gritty of one of the darling projects of open source, Apache.
There's a lot of talk about "community" in the open source world, and learned papers by the hundreds are chasing the mystery of why highly talented hackers give away code for free. But for those of use who don't hack code, maybe we just have to try to sit and stare at a blank wall for an hour or so to experience the "Zen" of something as grinding and nitty gritty as infrastructure maintenance.
Maybe it's sort of like the tedious poses that yoga practitioners do; or the mind-numbing, repetitive training that star athletes engage in; or the hours of relentless practice of top violinists slashing away at their violins. Maybe true beauty can't be bought by the billions of dollars stashed away in Microsoft's banks. Maybe the only way to "get" the Zen of open source community is to hunker down and grind out deadly dull infrastructure maintenance work. Maybe you actually gotta "feel the burn" to get the high.
There were no corporate press releases for this event. No splashy media ads or glossy print magazine ads. The event did not take place in a big, loud conference center such as San Francisco's spacious Moscone Center. There was no hoard of gawkers hoping to catch sight of someone famous. There were no booth babes or flashy booth displays or big deal keynote speakers giving presos in front of massive, wall-sized video flat screen panels;and no banners or security guards or fancy speaker passes. It took place at Brian Behlendorf's house, which is not even in a gated community. We drove right past his house the first time while looking for his address.
The guys that I interviewed were among some of the brightest minds in open source; Brian Behlendorf; Upayavira; Greg Stein; and Roy Fielding, all of whom are well known and regarded (or deserve to be). These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires, but instead but instead flew thousands of miles to sit slouching on couches and squatting on cushions hacking infrastructure maintenance for free, primarily just to hang out with each other, even though they could have done the same thing on line.
In public statements and in its 2004/9/1 SEC 10-k mandatory legal filing, Microsoft calls open source projects like Apache the second greatest profitability concern behind a weak global economy. Yet Microsoft doesn't "get" why their profitability is imperiled by a movement that their Chairman called a group of "communists." Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there.
When I asked these guys what they liked about the infrathon, some of them did talk about seeing the physical manifestations of the stuff that they were "seeing" in code form: they liked to visit the co-location facilities, the cages, and the actual boxes that are the work horses of the minor miracle that is Apache. They talked about the massive numbers of committers they support, the huge volumes of server hits and email messages, and the security measures protecting all of that massive activity, and they liked the fact that their work here makes all of that stuff go. But mostly, they just liked to hang out with each other.
I'm sure that each of them, upon reading this article, will say that I have made a big deal out of nothing. Each of them was busily volunteering each other's availability when I told them that I was going to interview them for this article.
I spoke with Brian Behlendorf, Upayavira, Greg Stein, and Roy Fielding, in that order, and their interviews have been transcribed, snipped, and pres
"Subversion trees"
Like a Phone tree, right, only they're subversives!
(yes, sub-version, I know)
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
IMHO, this is what sets OSS above/apart from The Microsoft Way. These guys got together over a weekend to do maintenance and fix bugs on a project they truly care about. The guys at MS only started fixing bugs when it became obvious that their ineptitude might cost them some of The Almighty Dollar.
That this meeting format method may even crop up on some HR person's desk as the next idea to try at m$.
...ale and couches at redmond. slashdot article coming next month ...
I mean, apache's clearly costing a lot less to make into a good product than IIS. And compare the relative profitability... hehe
-=fshalor
Does FireFox crash for anyone else when you click that link? Or is it just me?
and it's Firefox.
...the fellows that keep the PostgreSQL server farm up and running. It seems like there's always something coming up - new releases, web page tweaks, PGFoundry activity, and all that. Props to Marc Fournier, Dave Page, Andrew Dunstan, and the other fellows who make things run smoothly!
The Army reading list
Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there.
What is this elitist, racist bullshit? I can't even read the rest of the article now. Yes, let's flame someone for donating to poor people. He should put all of his money in a vault and go swimming Uncle Scrooge style and laugh at "them poor brown people" in his spare time. What. The. Fuck.
These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires
Skills isn't the hard part. It's the timing.
From TFA:
Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there.
Umm... Shouldn't the source be MadRacistPenguin?
Real journalism doesn't contain stupid shit like this: "Maybe Chairman Bill doesn't "get" it because he's too busy answering press calls about his generosity in donating his billions to them poor brown people over there."
There you go, simultaneously racist, stupid, and ignorant.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
At one time the empire of IBM was threatened by an uprising of folks building their own microprocessors (amateurs and small business), now the empire of Msft is threatened by folks writing their own software and making it available free or inexpensively.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I thought it was Dollar the Almighty?
The one that the community gained through providing the fruits of their labors to the world gratis?
The one that they gained through fewer defects/line of code?
The one they gained for advancing the cause of human freedom? (Encryption, keeping the web out of monopoly hands) 1984 is no nightmare for the proprietary software outfits - BB is a nice cohesive market. Contrast with Carly's ambition: building DRM into every product HP makes...
The OSS community has a great rep for anybody that has heard of it.
I can even hang with some of the poster's intent: seems to me OP feels there is condescenion (based on unconscious racism) on the part of Bill. I don't follow it that closely, so I can't say whether it is justified or not, but I have seen donors incrediby impressed with themselves and unable to identify with the recipients at all.
Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance really has nothing to do with motorcycle maintenance. It's about Quality with a capital Q.
So can we please have fewer of these "Zen and the art of blahblahblah" books?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Their argument was that "/" and "/index.html" could be the same content so in order to not double up they shouldn't cache "/".
I don't know why they singled out "/" ... any url on a site could serve up the same file!
They've got people working on Apache that don't understand the basics of urls. It's amazing.
The answer is E) none of the above. Chairman Bill is a hypocrite who donates a few hundred million dollars, which he won't miss because he deducts it from his income tax, at the same time he gets tens of billions dollars from his illegal monopoly.
We have a small website that we run for an irc channel.Just a couple of us maintain it and even then it sometimes becomes a pain in the ass to make small decisions and put something new up and things like that. I cant imagine how a website/project like apache is handled smoothly with soooo many people, all volunteers who have day jobs.Its really tough to even remove 2 hours a day from your schedule to dedicate to a project.Amazing. :)
Lord of the Binges.
Although TFA indicates FreeBSD, www.apache.org now seems to be running on a Linux server.
Come on... these guys are a bunch of enthused hobbiests working on the infrastructure for Apache -- apparently they were not working on the *software* itself, just the systems that *support* the software in various ways. Most boring, uninspiring article I've ever skimmed.
Woops, ISO 9000 isn't really about Quality, it's only about consistency.
What's the consistency of a fully laden European swallow's poop?
No, the Slashdot comments page loads just fine in Firefox.
I think Bill's promise to give away 90+% of his net worth is more noble than anything any slashdotter will ever accomplish.
Presuming it's not just a promise and he actually does it (I'm not familiar with this, I don't study Gates that closely), it still leaves him with hundreds of millions (or billions? - not sure of his current net worth, but it's enough to know it's way up there) of dollars, and still head of the worlds largest and most (financially and number-of-units sold) successful software company.
The OSS "community" has a bad reputation precisely because of ignorant stupid bullshit statements like that one.
Should the OSS community raise billions of dollars to give to charity? Are none of its members allowed to make "ignorant stupid bullshit statements"?
Do you not consider creating reliable software and making it freely available an admirable and useful goal? I think it IS an admirable and useful goal, and furthermore it's probably the one thing they can do that Bill Gates cannot do.
Tag lost or not installed.
Comfy chair? Comfy chair?
Poke him with the soft cusion!
> uname -ab o i386
FreeBSD minotaur.apache.org 4.11-STABLE FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE #8: Mon Mar 21 14:40:31 PST 2005 root@minotaur.apache.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/tur
>
Its interesting how many tier-1 web sites are FreeBSD based. I thought imdb.com was freebsd, but netcraft says Linux again...
Zen and the Art of Archery was first book in the long line of books named "Zen and the Art of X". In fact this was the only book that had accurate name. It was about Zen and Archery.
Now! I have been practising zen many years (zazen meditation) and I know something about zen's history and I can think myself as an Zen Buddhist on even numbered days. I find this Zen and stuff quite funny (Zen is japanese for Chan which is chinece for Jahna which is sanskrit/pali term meaning meditative concentration). How many people actually know that Zen is actually form of Buddhism!
Zen is probably the most media sexy name any religion or spritual tradition has ever had. How many other religions do you know that have mp3 player named after it.
Creative Mormon mp3 player just don't feel right.
Dyslexics have more fnu.
These guys have the skills to be Microsoft millionaires
isn't that vaguely insulting?
Dude... are you completely blind? Did you actually read what he said or did the term "poor brown people" really bother you that bad? I'm a "brown" person, though I'm not poor, but did I get all pissy and post ignorant comments here? No. Why? because I actually read it and understood what he meant. Yes, me, a brown person, not offended. Grow up!
Amen brother! Up the parent's score! He's said some of the most insightful things out of ALL the comments on this board. Well put, brother!
I think you're both to some extent missing the point about the true disconnect between percentage of income and the amount of sacrifice you are making when giving to charity.
Bill Gates, no matter how much money he gives away, even if he donated 99.9% of his net worth to charity, would still not ever worry about whether he's going to be able to buy food that day.
I'm sure Bill doesn't even think about the buying of food... he just eats--anything and anywhere he wants.
A person hovering near the poverty line has a genuine *sacrifice* to make regarding charity, food, medicine, shelter, etc.
Bill does not, and that's the real point.
/. scans your machine after you post.
ven if you're at poverty level, that is you make $9827/year
Australian war widows are paid a pension of approximately US$9200/yr
The unemployed are paid approximately US$4700/yr as are the permanently disabled
None of this matter though, since even Bill Clinton would die from conditions associated with morbid obesity within a year if he ate McDonald's 3 times a day. That would make your total contribution only around $275.
-- Howto: Get +5 (1) Whine about M$ (2) Namedrop Gentoo (3) Casually Abuse Mods (4) Namedrop Early Computer Model
And don't play the "Oh, well, it doesn't count because it's not a significant portion of his worth". A hungry person doesn't give a damn how much someone had to sacrifice to give him that bowl of soup.
Interesting, and why didn't he donate it to the starving "brown" people in his own country? Maybe the PR payoff would not be as good since they don't have the sympathy of the public.
Using the term brown is about as offensive as using the term white. Anyone who finds it offensive is too sensitive to live among other people. For those I would suggest to try becoming a hermit. I hear it's quite inoffensive.
-- Howto: Get +5 (1) Whine about M$ (2) Namedrop Gentoo (3) Casually Abuse Mods (4) Namedrop Early Computer Model
what would happen if that was recalculated as a % of disposable income?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.