On September 11, 2001, I was living in Berkeley, California. One of the things I remember most is the generous outpouring of sympathy for New York and the United States at the time, with Le Monde in Paris writing beautifully Nous sommes tous Américains: we are all Americans (translated version). Having lived in New York for two years now, what I didn’t fully appreciate then was the intense love that New Yorkers feel for the city. The towers themselves could be seen across the East River from the bedroom of my apartment where I live now in Brooklyn, which I know now because I see the Tribute in Light from that spot today. The city has become my own in the past two years of living here and I feel the impact of 9/11 in a way that I didn’t then.

Like most people, I had good friends in NYC at the time, and I caught a close friend working in midtown on IM that morning shortly after the second tower fell. I saved the transcript, and reading it now brings back the chaos and worry of that morning, the feeling of not knowing if the people you cared about were ok, and concern for the people who experienced such horror, mixed in with the human spirit of dark humor from someone who was in a frightening situation. I was lucky that my friends and loved ones were ok, but felt such a sense of sympathy and concern for those who weren’t sure about their love ones.

me: everything ok where you are?
friend: or relatively so?
friend: pendemonium
friend: i'm shaking so hard i can't even see straight
me: i was glad to see you pop up on IM.
friend: thx
friend: i'm looking for [friend of his]
friend: who works downtown
friend: classic [big company] internet moment. i can't post new content to [the web site he was working on]
me: the internet is pretty much hosed right now.
friend: i was on the subway right as it happened, evidently. 8:45
friend: i was just in the WTC on Monday
friend: labor day
me: i'm staying at home. . . not risking driving over the bay bridge today.
friend: i'm gonna be sick
me: is there any way to get back to queens?
friend: don't know, the bridges are closed
friend: nothing stop sspam. i just got 3 mails to enlarge my breast size
me: not surprised.
friend: was outside. so much chaos
friend: not safe to walk around even up here
me: why is it unsafe there? just too much panic?
friend: too much panic and confusion and emergency vehicles

Our conversation ended then, but I at least I knew he was ok at the moment, if not very shaken.

At that point, the news from CNN got to be overwhelming and I hopped on my bike to ride up into the Berkeley hills from the flatlands where I lived. When I got up there (about 1300 feet above sea level), I took some deep breaths and took in the views of the bay that had always had such a calming effect on me. That day, I remember gazing at the Golden Gate Bridge and taking a photo of it knowing that it had been evacuated out of concerns that terrorists might fly planes into it or blow it up. Would I be one of the last to see it intact? I took some other photos that day, in part to document what that day was like but also because I was legitimately wondering if something might happen to alter the landscape that I was seeing, not to mention the lives of those living in it. I thought of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. These were strange and frightening feelings, but I had seen the towers fall on TV just hours earlier and the rumor mill of what might happen on the west coast was going at full throttle.

I visited NYC about six weeks after 9/11 and the memorials around the city brought me to tears many times. I remember coming across a donation station for food and treats for the dogs who were still looking for victims, and there was still smoke in the air downtown as the remains of the building smoldered. The city was very much in mourning.

My heart goes out to those who lost friends and loved ones that day.

I’m super-excited about the panel proposal, Hacking Matters, that my friend and fellow hacker Tarikh Korula put together for SXSW. Havi Hoffman (@freshelectrons) will be joining us, too. I’ve been to SXSW three times now but have never done a panel, so I hope we get in (vote us up!)

Here’s what I wrote in the comments on the panel picker (I added some links here, which you can’t do in the SXSW comment system). (Read on for some links to some past presentations and blog posts on the subject that I collected that will give you a hint of what we’d be talking about in the panel.)

Hack Days are pure magic — events put together for engineers, by engineers, with the highest signal-to-noise ratio possible. PowerPoint draws hisses, and working demos rule the day. At Yahoo, with the generous help of Havi Hoffman and hundreds of hackers around Yahoo, I put together internal Hack Days on three continents before we did our first Open Hack Day in 2006, where I met Tarikh Korula, who won a prize [along with his partner Josh Rooke-Ley]. In May, Tarikh, Daniel Raffel, and I teamed up with Techcrunch to put the Hack Day together for their Disrupt Conference in NYC. Each event was special in its own way, but common themes and approaches made each one successful.

In this panel, we’ll tell you about our collective experiences with Hack Days and how you can put together your own successful Hack Days, whether you’re a 3-person startup or a Fortune 500 company. We hope you’ll give us a thumbs up! (Chad, @chaddickerson)

I wrote about the magic and unexpected wonders of Hack Days a lot when I was putting them together for Yahoo! — including once when the building hosting us in London was literally struck by lightning — but I’m most excited about giving some updated tips based on helping organize successful Hack Days in entirely new contexts, like the one we put together for Techcrunch Disrupt in NYC and what we’re doing with Hack Days inside a startup like Etsy (which I mentioned in my scaling startups post). Here are a collection of useful things from the past that I would likely be referring to in the panel:

• History of Hack Day (with a nice quote from Havi)
• Yahoo! Open Hack Day: How it all came together (behind-the-scenes details on how the epic Yahoo! Open Hack Day came together in 2006. Yeah, the one with Beck! Thinking about this event still gives me chills today.)
• Yahoo! Hack Day tomorrow and some of my inspirations (more about the philosophical underpinnings of Hack Day, including Steven Levy’s book Hackers. I was honored to meet Steven Levy at FOO Camp just this year.)
• Hack Day report: smells like Dunkirk spirit (from the Open Hack Day in London in 2007, where we were struck by lightning.)
• Report on Hack Day Bangalore in 2007 (one from me and one from Swaroop CH, one of the participants)
• Big Company Hacks at Yahoo! (O’Reilly eTech talk in 2007 about the Hack Day program at Yahoo!)
  • Slides (see slide #36 for Tarikh’s winning entry, the Ybox!)
  • Abstract and video

In any case, I’m hoping we’ll see you in Austin next March! (Wait, did I say you could vote for us? Just making sure.)

Haven’t blogged in a while, so going to shake the rust out of the engine with a little dark humor (side note: when I joined Salon back in the day, I named our first server “kafka”).

To those of you on the Q train this morning, that was me staring at my iPhone and cracking up. I have newfound respect and admiration for Bobbie Battista.

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Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

As I’ve been packing for my move, one thing that I haven’t been packing is papers. About a year ago, I posted about going paperless after I ordered a Fujitsu ScanSnap, the amazing little document scanner. I haven’t discussed the outcome of my paperless quest since then, but here’s the verdict (and I’m typing in all caps for the first time on my blog because this is just how emphatically I feel about it): BUY A SCANSNAP AND GO PAPERLESS NOW. THE IPHONE HAS NOTHING ON THE SCANSNAP. IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

The utter awesomeness of having everything available digitially didn’t truly hit me until I started packing for the move. I have one single thin folder of papers that can’t be scanned for one reason or another (e.g. a certified birth certificate that has embossed). Everything else fits on a thumb drive: receipts and tax materials for the past seven years, copies of loan papers, business cards, user manuals for various products I own that aren’t available online. . . . you name it.

Once I got these “official” papers all scanned, I started scanning various mementos of sentimental value that I didn’t want to throw away: old clippings from college, concert and sports tickets, the original copy of my valedictory speech at my high school graduation, bad poetry and song lyrics over the years, etc. These are things I didn’t want to throw away completely, but don’t deserve box space. The same goes for things like paper take-out menus for favorite restaurants. With experiences like Cover Flow in OS X, I even have the same experience of flipping through a shoebox of mementos or a stack of take-out menus.

So — in case I wasn’t clear, you should get a ScanSnap. That’s all I’m saying.

(Note: SOLD!! I ended up selling the car via Craigslist, so please don’t inquire. When someone showed up with good money 36 hours before the auction ended, I didn’t have the stomach to see if I could make a few hundred extra bucks. I cancelled my eBay auction and ate the listing fee. Still, it was pretty exciting watching the process.)

Since I won’t be needing a car in New York, I’m selling my Subaru. As Subarus go, this is a top-end model — all-leather interior, giant moon roof, all weather package (heated seats/mirrors), dual climate control for AC/heat, bike rack, etc. It’s a perfect car if you have kids, like to go skiing or snowboarding at Tahoe, mountain-biking, or just need to run errands around town. It’s in really great shape and I wouldn’t consider selling it if I wasn’t moving to a place where I don’t need a car.

I decided to give eBay a try out of curiosity more than anything else. If you’re interested, email me for more info (chad at the domain of this blog) and/or go bid on eBay — here is the listing and here are some photos:

Fire Eagle launched today. My favorite and most succinct quote in the extensive coverage about Fire Eagle was on VentureBeat from Mike Malone (developer at Pownce, one of the launch partners): “Location is hard, Fire Eagle is easy.” Very simply, Fire Eagle makes it simple for developers to build a wide array of location-aware applications and services without dealing with the hard parts.

The developer side is only half the story, though. For end users, Fire Eagle delivers on privacy. When Fire Eagle first went into beta back in early March, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb really nailed the importance of Fire Eagle’s focus on end user privacy in combination with the developer platform:

Yahoo! put privacy right out front. Many people want their data to be portable from service to service and many people want that to include their location data from mobile or other interfaces. I personally don’t want my location broadcast automatically, at all, to anyone thank you very much. Fire Eagle has privacy and user control of data written all over it.

Users have the option to hide themselves with a single click, they can click to purge all their data from the Fire Eagle databases, the service even lets you select how often you’d like to receive an email reminding you that it is tracking your location as asking you to confirm that you want tracking to continue. By default you’re emailed once a month for consent to be reconfirmed! Hello trust building measures! It’s almost enough to make me interested in exposing my location, selectively.

. . . .

Standards based platform plus strong privacy equals the best scenario I can imagine for a location tracking service.

Indeed. Check out the Application Gallery to see what kinds of applications are being built around Fire Eagle. I’m sure the number will be growing quickly in the coming weeks and months, and I’ll be watching.

In any case, a huge congrats to the Fire Eagle team is in order — nice work!

Today is my last day at Yahoo! and last night what I thought was going to be a small gathering of friends for drinks at 21st Amendment blew up into a bona fide party. At some moment during the party, I realized that four former Brickhouse leaders were all there (Scott Gatz, Salim Ismail, and Bradley Horowitz), then the Beatles popped into my head, and then I remembered the crosswalk out on 2nd Street that I’ve walked through so many times. Hmmmm. . . . .

Within minutes, I had gathered Scott, Salim, and Bradley outside and I started taking my shoes off. Bradley looked up the real Abbey Road cover on his iPhone while we were standing in the middle of the street. Sara Wood stopped traffic briefly and Ricky Montalvo took the shot (and later made it incredibly stylish). I can’t imagine a more memorable and playful image to mark the end of my time at Yahoo — thanks, Bradley, Salim, Scott, Ricky, and Sara!

I’m really excited about John Allspaw’s forthcoming book, The Art of Capacity Planning (available in as-it-is-being-written form on O’Reilly’s Safari Rough Cuts with an estimated publication date of October 15, 2008). To put it mildly, John is a rock star (literally!) and anyone who spends any time making web sites run should reserve a space on your bookshelf for this one. I’ve been a direct beneficiary of his knowledge in the last two companies I worked for before Yahoo, and now as a colleague at Yahoo, where John runs ops for Flickr. Here’s how John describes his book and his approach in the preface:

This book is not about building complex models and simulations. It’s not about spending time running benchmarks over and over.

It’s about practical capacity planning and management that can happen in a real world. It’s about using real tools and being able to adapt to changing usage on a website that will (hopefully) grow over time. When you get a flat tire on the highway, you could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what popped your tire, or you can get on with it, pop on the spare, and keep on going.

That is the approach to capacity planning that I’m suggesting: adaptive, not theoretical.

Having been in the trenches with John on a number of occasions, I can vouch for his approach. I’m reading the early chapters now and look forward to the rest.

As a related aside, John just gave a talk at the Velocity conference that you should check out: Capacity Management for Web Operations.

(Photo of John by me in July 2005)