One year has come and gone! In early 2011 I started a challenge to all interested Systems Administrators to add 10,000 points to their existing ServerFault reputation. Quite a few people signed up for it, but how many actually made it to the finish line? Oh, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s talk about what our participants will win.

The Prizes

How many IT workers, in the course of being a SysAdmin / Developer / Frobnosticator, have come up against a seemingly insurmountable quandary? If you are in that category, how many times have you written out your woes in a forum post, only to have the problem (and solution) become clear to you as you’re nearly ready to post your question? I thought it was just me and my strange brain, however it appears that it’s a common experience.

This experience is so common for me that the main reason why I even have a blog is because I so frequently find solutions as a result of writing / talking out my problems. There is a name for this kind of behavior within the IT realm. It’s commonly known as “Rubber Duck Debugging.” I think all SysAdmins, IT workers in general and human beings both near and far would see immense benefits from calmly talking out their problems. To encourage this end, the prize for our winners will be handsome Luxury Ducks made by a company called bud (intentional lower case ‘b’).

Specifically, those who achieved their goal of adding 10,000 points in the year 2011 will receive a large luxury duck of their choice:

Those who achieved at least half of their 10,000 point goal will receive a mini luxury duck of their choice:

The Winners

Finally, we get to our well deserving winners. We only have two participants who added 10,000 points to their January 1st 2011 reputation levels. Those two winners are:

1. Philip “Chopper3” Buckley-Mellor who added nearly 23,000 points to his reputation.
2. Michael “Voretaq7” Graziano who added 20,500 points to his reputation

We have a few participants who made a valiant effort to get to 10,000 points, but only passed the halfway mark:

1. Rob Moir made 7,200 points in 2011
2. Phil Hollenback made 6,700 points in 2011 (Two words: Cron. Master.)
3. Tom O’Connor made 5,000 points in 2011

Adulations!

The whole goal of the ServerFault / Stack Exchange challenge was to encourage professional growth, community involvement, knowledge sharing and some old fashioned fun. I hope it achieved its goal, but only you can be the proper judge of that.

Congratulations to all of those involved! Your contributions are top notch and help to teach the next generation of professional IT workers and even the current crowd. No one knows it all and every one of us can help another to learn a bit more and become a bit better.

Thank you for what you did in 2011 and what you continue to do.

The Future

Will there be a 2012 challenge? Will it be the same format? Same prizes? Same rules?

Stay tuned…

…and keep answering questions on ServerFault.

Back in August I blogged about the ServerFault Scalability Conference that was happening this October 2011. Sad to say, the conference has been called off. Check out Joel Spolsky’s post about the cancellation. In short, both DevDays and the Scalaibility Conference were called off due to lack of sign-ups.

DevDays ’09 was a $99 one-day event in ten cities. Affordable, close-by and easy to get time off for. This latest iteration was a $499 two day event in only four cities. All the things you loved, with none of the things you loved. Okay, perhaps that’s overstating things a bit, but it was a bit harder to get time off to go to something like that.

Here’s Joel’s quick FAQ, but make sure to read the full blog post for details:

Q: I registered anyway. Will I get a refund?

A: Yes, this will happen automatically. If you have any trouble or questions email Alex & Alison at [email protected] for help.

Q: What about the ServerFault Scalability Conference?

A: That has been canceled, also.

Q: What about the hackathon in Washington, DC?
A: We’ll let you know. We are still planning to hold the Stack Exchange company meeting in Washington, so we will try to organize some public event at the same time.

Q: Why don’t you just scale back to $99, one-day conferences?

A: Unfortunately, the four conferences we planned this year were going to be held at much larger venues and would have cost way too much to put on, so we can’t just trim them back to one day, $99 events.

Q: What are you going to do in the future?

A: We want to work on a much larger number of much smaller events in far more cities, such as meet-ups and individual talks sponsored by Stack Overflow.

Just in case you’ve missed my many references to it, I have been struggling with an addiction. To a website. A website that has badges. No, it’s not facebook. It’s ServerFault.com.

Like any true addict, I defend my addiction. However, unlike most addicts, my addiction truly is productive! Also, unlike addicts, I CAN QUIT ANYTIME I WANT!! What’s so productive about the site is that I get to rub elbows with people who are way, way smarter than me. I get to watch them as they engage Deep Thought Mode over particularly snarled problems… as well as occasionally smacking their foreheads at some choice examples of silliness. People like Chopper3, JoeQwerty, Warner, MrDenny and of course Evan Anderson have some stellar technological skills and they amazingly share their expertise with others on ServerFault… for free.

As great of a resource as ServerFault is, every once in a while it’s productive to actually venture out into meatspace and talk with your colleagues face to face. There are plenty of great conferences already in existence for SysAdmins to attend, however ServerFault has teamed with the High Scalability blog and created a new one called the “High Scalability Conference“.

From the website:

Scalability, brought to you by Server Fault and High Scalability, is a one-day educational conference this October 14, 2011 in San Francisco, CA. Attend and learn how to create scalable systems.

Don’t miss these awesome sessions!
Ganeti Virtualzation Management: Improving the Utilization of Your Hardware and Your Time
Speaker:
Tom Limoncelli, Google

Three Scaling Directions, A Panel Discussion
Speakers:
Markus Frind, Plenty of Fish
Ben Kochie, Google
Jeff Atwood, Stack Exchange

Scalability in Network Visibility – Is your Network Too Complex to Know What’s Going On?
Speaker:
Loris Degioanni, Riverbed

The event is taking place for a single day on October 14, 2011 at The Concourse Exhibition Center in San Francisco and costs $299USD. However, if you use the promotional code ‘nubbyadmin’ you’ll recieve $100 off! Thanks Kyle!

The Scalability Conference is part of the San Francisco leg of the larger series of worldwide StackOverflow DevDays 2011 Conferences. In fact, you can attend both days of the SanFrancisco DevDays conference and the single day Scalability conference with a SuperPass for $748USD.

The presenters are top notch. The venue is class. The organizers are choice. The price is amazing. I hope you’ll sign up. While you may not get to meet the ServerFault members that I mentioned above (or maybe you will!) I’m sure you’ll meet someone that you’ve seen on ServerFault. If you do make it, make sure to take plenty of pictures! Especially if you see a Paddington Bear ride… (shameless ServerFault inside joke).

Last week I sent out a cry for help concerning the 2011 10K ServerFault challenge. Several people responded offering their skills and ideas and as I dreaded, I had to make a difficult decision. Before I tell a bit more about the final decision, let me say thank you to those who offered their help. One of those was Ben Pilbrow who offered up some scripts to be able to pinpoint a user’s reputation on January 1st. If you need some PHP done keep him on your short list.

Another possibility I had to choose from was developed by GeorgeEdison on StackExchange of Quick Media Solutions with some help from Jack of All Trades Jacob Jernigan. You can see the application here as well as seeing the Stack Apps page for it over yonder. It certainly looks good! In fact, this link will be the temporary means of keeping track of participants. Check to see if your name is on there (newer entrants might not be) and see how you’ve been doing!

But what of the final decision for a ServerFault Challenge app? Dan Seaver of RubyOverflow fame had some great ideas for an app based on Ruby on Rails. After some discussion, we worked out that perhaps coupling it closely with my blog or even my domain might not be the best idea. In fact, restricting the use of the app to just ServerFault or even just a single challenge from this blog was really limiting the possibilities.

Here’s the plan thus far. Instead of “The ServerFault Challenge” the website will be StackExchangeChallenge.com and will eventually be a self-service style website where anyone can sign up, set goals and time limits, look at pretty graphs, crunch numbers and generally keep themselves on task for any goals they may have that involve any website that is part of the larger Stack Exchange family of sites.

Thanks to the people at Stack Exchange Inc. for helping us out by purchasing the domain StackExchangeChallenge.com and allowing us to use the term “Stack Exchange” in our site title. All of this is with the knowledge that Stack Exchange Inc. is not affiliated with the Stack Exchange Challenge website and wholly owns the Stack Exchange trademark.

I’ll keep everyone up to date on the website’s progress. Of course, if you have any feature ideas you can send them to me at [email protected], contact me with the “Contact Me!” link at the top of my blog or leave comments below. However, we don’t quite have everything that we’d like yet. “What remains?” you might ask. Well…

Stack Exchange Challenge Needs teh Pretties!

It’s such an old saw, but it’s nearly universally true. Developers aren’t the best designers (I personally only know of one exception to that rule). The question that I have for anyone reading this is: Are you a web designer and would you grace the project with your skills? Of course, any design work will be fully credited and we’d love to give link juice from the Stack Exchange Challenge site to a place where people can hire your awesome self. This site has the potential to be seen by hundreds of thousands of users with backgrounds as diverse as the entire Stack Exchange family of sites. There’s no design goals other than make it awesome. You would have complete control over the entire visual appeal of the site.

If you’re interested in heading up the design of this site, send me an email at [email protected] and we’ll discuss things further. I’d love to see some of your previous work. And of course, since I suspect that at least a few folks will volunteer, that means I’ll have to make a tough decision. Showing that you can take “ownership” of a project and at the same time remain open to suggestions will go a long way to swaying me in your direction. =)

I’ll keep everyone up to date on the progress of the project. With any luck, it should be done by the time Phil Hollenback hits 10K.

In January of this year, I organized a 10,000 point challenge for ServerFault (or whatever your StackExchange preference is). The general idea is to commit to adding 10,000 points to your ServerFault account. (Note: that doesn’t mean that you need to reach 10,000 points. You need to add 10,000 points to your Jan 1, 2011 total.)

After a few tweets from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky twenty-eight people have already signed up! That’s twenty-seven more than I expected. The current leader of the challenge appears to be Phil Hollenback who has already garnered just over 5,000 points at the time of this writing. It only appears that Phil is the current leader because I have no easy way of tracking the progress of each user. Some very generous individuals, including Ben Pilbrow, Jonathon Angliss and Scott Pack, have individually whipped up some quick scripts in various languages to cull the information and display it. However, it was up to me to actually implement the scripts and… well… I suck, so that didn’t happen. I am very appreciative that they thought the cause was worthy enough to spend their time making something for it and ashamed at myself for letting their efforts lay by the wayside.

I’ll be a bit more open about what has been keeping me away from being more active in this challenge as well as my blog. There are three things that have hammered me lately.

1. Health. For the last four years I have struggled with what I can most simply call vertigo that was the result of a singularly nasty flu. Two months ago I had a relapse. It’s getting better, but not getting enough sleep causes me to relapse. Being dizzy consumes a surprising amount of the body’s energy and also brings productivity to a screeching halt. Relapses take weeks to recover from and only repair with sleep.
2. Work. In the two blog posts on my failure as a SysAdmin “A Tale of Laziness, Good Fortune and Self Loathing” and “Continued Self Loathing and Why You Should RTFineM” I chronicled how I have come to the conclusion that I am spread too thin and the risking catastrophic failures of several projects. I’ve stopped taking on new responsibilities and am working out a plan to remove myself from several things so that I can more responsibly focus on more profitable tasks. That’s doesn’t mean I’ll stop blogging or even curating the ServerFault challenge. I think those things are rewarding and help my professional life. However, in the time between when I saw the error of my ways and the time when I can step back from my over-commitment, I’m still working from morning until nighttime. I haven’t been able to justify departing from putting out fires and preventing other conflagrations long enough to look into the ServerFault Challenge.
3. Friends. I’ve had a number of friends who have had some troubled or confusing times in life and I’ve had to stop and succor them. I have no problem doing that at all and I’m not complaining. In fact, the time that it’s taken up is probably inconsequential compared to the above two bullet points. I’d much rather talk all night to a troubled friend than eat, sleep or restore a web server. It is what it is and it’s at least part of why I haven’t been able to give time to side projects like the ServerFault challenge.

What I’m Asking For

Phil’s milestone of reaching the halfway mark hilighted to me that I need to reach out for some help and ask “do you haz teh codes?” I’m not in a position to do much of anything on this project, so I’m asking for pure grace here: Would anyone like to create and own a simple web application to keep track of each of the challenges, its participants and their individual goals?

I’m not asking for a total freebie. I will gladly provide link juice to you if you’re a freelancer or employed at a development house of some kind. My blog isn’t exactly the next Daring Fireball as far as traffic is concerned, but I have a reach of about 600 to 2000 viewers (depending on how you do the math) in the SysAdmin world as of this post. We can work out the specifics in more detail if you contact me. Here are some of my thoughts on what I’d like to see:

• I’d prefer the application to be hosted on my domain. Ideally I thought it would be cool to have a “ServerFault Challenge” link at the top of my blog, next to the Blog List and perhaps the web app be a WordPress plugin. That’s just a fancy of mine though.
• It has to have at least a teeny bit of visual attractiveness. We’re not talking a Webby Award candidate, but more than just an HTML table with thick borders.
• A pretty line graph showing the progress of all participants participant over time
• Same way of showing who is close to their relative challenge goals and who has already achieved them.
• Perhaps make it easy for people to sign up for the contest? currently people simply drop links in the comments section of the original blog post and I manually find their StackExchange flair graphic and figure out their approximate Jan 1 reputation score.
• Reusable would be nice. The likelihood is high that the challenge will become an annual thing. Perhaps with different challenges and rules, but the same general concept of reputation goals.
• Anything else cool that you’d like to see. Really, I’d love for someone to be as creative as they want to be.

You must keep in mind, though, that I am in no way affiliated with ServerFault or StackExchange and cannot necessarily use their logos or trademarks in anything. While I doubt my calling this little challenge ”The 10K ServerFault Challenge!” will result in a cease and desist order, placing their logos all over the challenge page might test the boundaries.

How I’ll Choose the “Winner”

I imagine that there will be at least a few people interested in getting involved, so I’ll have to make a tough decision between candidates. It would be helpful if I had some samples of your work to look at. Also, if you wanted to integrate the application into my WordPress blog, it would be helpful to see that you’ve worked with WordPress development before. I’m sure you’re the hottest Django developer on the planet, but I’d be a bit nervous if you decided to learn PHP and WordPress development on my blog. If you wanted to make a Django based app, no problem! That’s what subdirectories are for. =)

Finally, it would be good if you knew a bit about the ServerFault API and what the rules are concerning it’s usage. Existing StackExchange enthusiasts will be favored, although not necessarily a shoe-in.

How to Apply

Simply email me at [email protected] or use the contact form linked at the top of my blog and tell me who you are and what you’d like to do. We’ll talk from there and, depending on the number of people interested, I’ll make a decision in a few days to a few weeks.

To all of those who have already signed up, thanks and keep plugging away! To anyone else interested in the challenge, it’s not too late to sign up.