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Jeremy Zawodny

Biography

Jeremy Zawodny and his two cats moved from Northwest Ohio to Silicon Valley in late 1999 so he could work for Yahoo!--just in time to witness the .com bubble bursting first-hand. He's been at Yahoo!® ever since, helping to put MySQL and other Open Source technologies to use in fun, interesting, and often very big ways. Starting with the popular and high-traffic Yahoo! Finance site, he worked to make MySQL part of the site's core infrastructure in large batch operations as well as real-time feed processing and serving content directly on the site. He then helped to spread "the MySQL religion" to numerous other groups within Yahoo!, including News, Personals, Sports, and Shopping. Nowadays he acts as Yahoo!'s MySQL guru, working with Yahoo!'s many engineering groups to get the most out of their MySQL deployments.

In 2000, he began writing for Linux Magazine and continues to do so today as a columnist and contributing editor. After over a year of active participation on the MySQL mailing list, he got the idea to write a book about MySQL. (How hard could it be, really?) You can still find him answering questions on the list today. Since 2001, Jeremy has been speaking about MySQL at various conferences (O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, PHPCon, The MySQL User Conference, etc.) and user groups in locations as far away as Bangalore, India. His favorite topics are performance tuning, replication, clustering, and backup/recovery. In more recent times, he's rediscovered his love of aviation, earning a Private Pilot Glider license in early 2003. Since then he's spent far too much of his free time flying gliders out of Hollister, California and Truckee, near Lake Tahoe. He hopes to soon earn his Commercial Pilot license and then go on to become a certified flight instructor someday. Occasional MySQL consulting also helps to pay for his flying addiction.

Jeremy rambles almost daily about technology and life in general on his weblog: www.jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/

Blog

Jeremy's blog posts are hosted at:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/

Speaking at San Francisco MySQL Meetup

November 16 2009

I'll be speaking Tuesday night at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. Here's the blurb from the announcement: Jeremy Zawodny will talk about Craigslist's current use of MySQL, where it's painful, and how things are being re-architected to make the pains go away. This includes hardware changes, sphinx, redis, memcached, and… read more

Fixing Poor MySQL Default Configuration Values

November 09 2009

I've recently been accumulating some MySQL configuration variables that have defaults which have proven to be problematic in a high-volume production environment. The thing they all have in common is a network blip or two can trigger some very undesirable behavior. max_connect_errors If a client is having trouble connecting to… read more

Recent Sphinx Updates

October 30 2009

If you use the Sphinx search engine and have been watching the development branch (0.9.10) and wondering when to upgrade, I'm here to tell you that "now" is a great time. As of r2037, the last major issue I regularly saw has been fixed. The other big bug was fixed… read more

Oracle and MySQL

October 22 2009

In The EU and MySQL, Tim Bray treads lightly on the topic of Oracle's pending ownership of MySQL if the Sun acquisition goes through. I left a comment on his post, but he's likely to be heavily moderating what appears there since he works for Sun. So here's what I… read more

Lazy Shopping Carts

October 11 2009

What's with all the lazy shopping carts? It seems that through the years, shopping carts have become progressively more lazy. Years ago, when a shopping cart was done with its duty, it had to find its way all the way back from your car to the store entrance--either just inside… read more

Pass the Duct Tape

September 24 2009

Reading The Duct Tape Programmer really hit a nerve with me. If you code for a living (or part of your living), go read it. I sometimes get annoyed by Joel Spolsky's writing, but this time he hit the nail right on the head. I am by no means putting… read more

Watching Yahoo's Transformation

September 22 2009

Having not worked at Yahoo in a bit over a year, it's interesting, amusing, and frustrating to watch what's going on over there. Some of their moves confirm feelings I've had for some time, while others are more puzzling. The Search deal with Microsoft was basically inevitable. You could see… read more

How my netbook taught me to love xmonad

September 20 2009

I've had this low-level urge to try a new window manager for a few months now. I work on a Linux box (Ubuntu) daily and mostly run a number of terminals, GNU Emacs, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome. Nothing too fancy, really. Oh, and a shitty VPN client. Background Most… read more

Pandora vs. CDs

August 24 2009

I've been using Pandora for streaming music on-line for a while now. I enjoy it so much that I pay the roughly $5-$6 per month for a higher quality stream and because I want to do my part to make sure they stay viable as a business. What's so great… read more

Firefox vs. Google Chrome Revisited

August 10 2009

Last week, in Google Chrome is the New Firefox, and Firefox the new IE, I ranted a bit about how slow Firefox 3 (notably tab switching and the "awesome" bar") was on my Ubuntu 9.04 machine. Needless to say, I got some good feedback from that post and it prompted… read more

Google Chrome is the New Firefox, and Firefox the new IE

August 03 2009

I spent too long on Friday screwing around with stuff on my work laptop in an effort to make Firefox's apparent performance not SUCK ASS. Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04 I've been somewhat unhappy, mostly as a result of the well publicized issues with Intel Video on Ubuntu… read more

Flying an Ultralight Trike or Weight Shift Control Aircraft

August 02 2009

On Saturday Kathleen and I took advantage of the chance to take a short class in Trike flying and then go up for introductory rides. This was an event organized by AreoDynamic Aviation (formerly Amelia Reid Aviation) at the Reid-Hillview Airport in San Jose. We arrived to find Pete Marsh's… read more

Loose Fuel Cap and Losing Fuel In-Flight (with Video)

July 27 2009

While our flying trip to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons was great, we had a few problems along the way. Like they say, bad things often come in groups of three. This was our third one. (The other two involved a hiding cat and a blown tail wheel on the… read more

Sunset over the Grand Tetons

July 20 2009

Our trip to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone is going very well. We've been pretty busy, so I haven't had a lot of time to write. But here's a picture of the sunset from tonight. We're taking lots of pictures and video with the Flip and enjoying the scenery. Weather… read more

Flying to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons

July 17 2009

We're heading out on a little summer vacation flying trip this morning in our Citabria. We'll be visiting Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. We'll be flying from San Jose to Twin Falls, Idaho today. Then tomorrow we'll fly from Twin Falls to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. For those pilots or aviation… read more