I didn’t get a chance to publicly pontificate about Internet Archive while I was employed there. From March 2019 until very recently, I managed the Core Infrastructure team at Internet Archive.
I suppose I did take one notable opportunity to blog about it. I wrote a blog post for blog.archive.org titled “Two Thin Strands of Glass“, which was about the long outage we had due to a fiber cut. It happened the day before the manager of our operations team (and lead network engineer) Jonah Edwards and his spouse were planning to leave San Francisco for their new home address in Portland, Oregon. My role during the outage was to briefly be the remote hands at the colocation facility for our upstream connection the Internet the evening the site went out, and to reinforce the message Jonah was telling us: there is no situation so bad that a panicked response won’t make it worse. Thankfully, the team was really great at biding their time until the fiber repair was complete, and quickly restored service once the fiber connection was repaired.
I loved working with Internet Archive, and I wish the organization well. As a longtime Wikipedian, I’m looking forward to having better access to the books that show up in Wikipedia citations. The team that I managed (Internet Archive’s “Petabox” team) is an amazingly intelligent and capable group of people, and facilitated a lot of fantastic services (both directly, and indirectly though the larger staff). I learned a ton about how this scrappy non-profit provides such an important service to the world (over 50 Petabytes of storage!) with such a small budget.
As for what’s happening with me next: I’m not sure. There’s software I’ve been working on for the past few years that I’d like to make suitable for wider adoption. I’ll probably also return to working on electoral reform (e.g. re-engage in work on electowiki.org) and helping to ensure that what happened in 2016 doesn’t happen again.
Back in 1996, I wrote an article for The Perl Journal, which they published in the Volume 1, Issue 3 in Autumn 1996. There are several alternatives available for the article:
