John Allspaw is a great ops engineer. Our very own Matt Cupples is a big fan, and I am too. I'd heard great things from my Y! and Flickr friends (Allspaw used to work his magic at the more-complicated-than-you-might-imagine Flickr), and when I read his book The Art Of Capacity Planning around '08, I completely understood why people said good things.

He's at Etsy now, and they recently had some issues. Etsy handles the tech so their customers don't have to. But sometimes there are still tech issues, even with a very good team. What matters is how they respond, and I wanted to call out Allspaw for handling it like a true professional. He wrote what techies call a 'postmortem' to explain in detail what happened. Between geeks, this could have been a few sentences, but Allspaw broke it down so that even very non-technical people can understand it.

If you're a tech person, you should read it to understand the level of explanation that non-techies can benefit from.

Hats off to John. I owe you a beer someday, man.