Sunday December 23, 2018; 10:33 AM EST
A long time ago, in 2010, I was selling my house in Berkeley while living in NYC. On the weekend I had to move out, I had two days to get everything done and then drive back to NY, my main server on EC2 went down. Just died. So I quickly (the movers were arriving) redirected to another server and wrote a post asking if anyone reading my blog had a clue what the problem might be. It never occurred to me that it would be escalated to a problem inside Amazon, that they would treat my post as an urgent request for support. I was asking readers of my blog, many of whom use AWS, if they had any ideas that I could quickly look at that might help me find the problem. This is something I have always done here, today I call them braintrust queries. My readers are smart, generous, know their stuff, and love to show off. I take advantage of that, and am always sure to publicly post the results so it becomes part of the knowledge base of the open web. #- Anyway, I got a call from an engineer at Amazon as a dozen people were working in the house I was turning over in a few hours, loading up stuff, asking for help, etc. The call couldn't have come at a worse time. I explained I couldn't talk, and said goodbye. The guy at the other end sounded surprised and miffed. I imagine in his mind he was doing me a huge favor (he was) and somehow I couldn't stop everything to get the (unexpected) help. At the same time I felt unworthy of the support, yet unable to accept it. #
- To make matters worse, when I finally did find the problem, it was a server log overflowing, getting so large the software just thrashed, it couldn't complete a request. It wasn't Amazon software. As soon as I emptied the log, the server returned to normal.#
- Anyway, I'm often working on stuff that makes their system better. If this is the reason we don't communicate, what a misunderstanding and what a missed opportunity. #