02.08.2012 By Lara Swanson
The Ada Initiative: Supporting Women In Open Technology & Culture
Dyn’s charitable arm DynCares recently contributed to an organization close to my heart: the Ada Initiative. They describe themselves as a “non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media”.
It’s named after Ada Lovelace, widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer and someone who has her own day in October that I love celebrating every year. Eager to spread awareness of the organization and the good work they do, I asked Valerie Aurora, Executive Director of the Ada Initiative, a few questions about the organization and how individuals and companies can get involved.
Read More01.18.2012 By Tom Daly
Protesting SOPA and PIPA With Web Blackouts
Since our last post on the topic of SOPA back in December, there has been a few significant events that have caused our concerns regarding SOPA to move over to PIPA.
First, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith announced that he plans to make a manager’s amendment to SOPA to remove the DNS blocking provisions from the bill. It seems as though Congress has recognized the importance of the way the DNS is constructed and how the former provisions would have caused a fracturing of the DNS and put up false barriers to the ongoing deployment and support of DNSSEC.
As we blogged in December, the technical means for implementing SOPA now lie with the domain registrar and the authoritative DNS provider – the same way that Internet abuse handling techniques have handled these issues for years.
Second, Dyn has begun to monitor a piece of legislation known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) that was introduced to the Senate by Senator Patrick Leahy. The Senate Judiciary Committee has passed the bill, but it has been placed on hold by Senator Ron Wyden. This bill also has provisions for DNS based redirection and blocking of sites, which we continue to believe that in implementation will result in a degradation of DNS services offered across the Internet.
Third, today marks a day of active web protest against SOPA and PIPA, indicating that an implementation of SOPA or PIPA would effectively subject the Internet to U.S. national censorship; a concept which becomes a technical feasibility under the implementation of SOPA or PIPA. Sites including Wikipedia and Google are participating in the protest by blocking out portions of their web sites from access today.
Frankly, these protests prove a point on what the result of such legislation could levy against Internet operations as a whole. You can learn more about this web protest here. If you look at the upper left of Dyn’s website, you can see an update of our logo to voice our opposition.
At Dyn, we continue to strongly oppose any legislation that puts the stability and availability of the global DNS system as risk. We believe that there are existing processes at the domain name registrar and authoritative DNS levels to deal with the issues raised by SOPA and PIPA and that DNS-level blocking or redirection would effectively break the DNS.
Read More01.17.2012 By Jeremy Hitchcock
From Individuals To Systems…And To Individuals Again
As was hinted at in earlier posts, our 2012 theme at Dyn is Better, Faster, Stronger. 2011 saw a number of changes here: a new office, many new clients, the concept of functions and lots of new faces. We spent the last year putting a lot of new stuff together, making the year ahead about fine tuning.
Since reliability is core to our services, the reliability of our staff is also core. We think about it as a bus theory: how many people can get hit by a bus before operations suffer (yeah, a little morbid)? As a result, we try to have people cross trained and share responsibilities.
2011 meant that almost every function became part of a system, mostly because of scale. We had to figure out how to break things up so that multiple people could share the load. We went to systems instead of individuals.
For 2012, we’re going to go back to people.
People are the ones that make differences and ensure that things don’t fall through the cracks. People are also the ones that challenge how things are done and replace broken systems with better systems. In the end, people make the difference in anything and everything a company does.
The only difference is that there are a lot more of us now that help make a difference at Dyn everyday.
Read More01.05.2012 By Dan McAuliffe
Culture-Con Preview: Improving Internal Communication By Uniting Specialists & Generalists
Most people would agree that good communication is a critical factor to the health of any company. It’s the lifeblood that helps us to capture ideas, spread knowledge and realize common goals. However, promoting this “healthy flow” of communication can be difficult. This rings especially true with those who operate in the technology industry, as they know firsthand how it can sometimes feel like the business and technology departments literally speak two different languages.
Great salespeople cannot make up for a technology that lacks in meeting customers’ needs and an amazing and revolutionary product team cannot succeed if the business side has no clue about the value their products provide. It’s information exchange that keeps a company strong and it requires both the business and technology departments to work together to maintain an open line of communication.
But this isn’t always so easy.
It’s amazing how the exact same set of words can be interpreted two very different ways by the business and technology departments. And although these two sides may very well want similar things, they tend to convey these wants quite differently. They often value things differently, approach problems differently and communicate within themselves differently. It makes sense when you look at it — they are simply doing what works best internally for their department.
Therefore, high-tech companies that reduce the barriers of communication between their business and technology departments open up opportunities for more accelerated, more dynamic product development and a better understanding of the company’s value proposition.
So how are interdepartmental communications, especially those between technical and business units, being strengthened? Companies are finding a healthy balance between two types of people – specialists and generalists.
Read More12.30.2011 By Kyle York
8 Reasons Dyn’s 2011 Will Lead To A Better, Faster, Stronger 2012
Thank you.
Two simple words that we say to our customers around the world. Two simple words we say to our partners around the world. Two simple words we say to our friends, colleagues and most importantly, our employees that have helped contribute to the best Internet IaaS company on the planet.
2011 was our biggest year yet for a lot of reasons, but we’ve picked out eight big ones that we’ll look back on as key igniters to why a better, faster & stronger 2012 is ahead.
Read More12.16.2011 By Chris Widner
Culture-Con Preview: 8 Ideas For Enhancing Culture Via Positive Change
In the nearly five years I’ve been at Dyn, I’ve seen a lot of change. We’ve gone from offering DNS and email services to home consumers and small businesses to supporting some of the biggest names on the web in our evolution into a true Internet IaaS leader.
When you’re employee #16, you and everyone else wear a lot of hats. But as you grow, you start bringing in more specialists and you have to learn to give some of those hats away. If you’re not careful, you can isolate employees and leave them feeling undervalued.
With the first Culture-Con coming up in January, I wanted to pass the microphone to Bob Faw from the Matchbox Group, Chief Ignition Officer and one of the co-organizers of the event, for some thoughts on how to move forward with change in a positive way.
- Chris Widner, Director of Culture & Talent Development
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12.14.2011 By Kyle York
Dyn’s Growth Engine Formula
The following was an address to the entire Dyn sales team at their annual retreat.
“To see the future, you must first see the past.”
This all started for me with a belief: a belief that by being human, accessible, real and transparent in a profession long viewed the opposite, we could achieve big, big things. We could see immense sales, revenue and profitability growth. We could build a growth engine formula for success that others would aspire to mimic and one that we would forever maintain.
Read More11.23.2011 By David DePiano
Thanks(giving) From the Dyn Family
This time of year, you usually hear messages of thanks from family, friends and even corporate entities. While we like to look at ourselves differently as Dyners, we really have a lot to be thankful for this year. I’d like to give a little attention and thanks to our customers, employees, families, and our vendors.
We’d Have Nothing Without Our Customers
Without our customers, we have nothing. Customers like Twitter grew with Dyn from Standard DNS to our DynECT Managed DNS platform. As Dyners, we cannot express our sincere thanks enough to our customers who believe in our technology and us as a company. You are what motivates us to come to work each day. We love telling your stories and being a part of your success and growth. Your success and growth is our success and growth.
We also have a group of customers who help us make sure our future products in DNS, Email and in our Labs are competitive and solve certain technological issues. To our Thought Leader Council, thank you for your insight.
To all our customers, we cannot thank you enough for helping us get to where we are today. We sincerely look forward to our futures together.
Read More11.18.2011 By Jeremy Hitchcock
SOPA: What You Should Know & Why Dyn Opposes It
Are you familiar with the Great Firewall Of China? Sometimes referred to as the Golden Shield project, it’s a Chinese government censorship and Internet surveillance project kicked off in 1998 and put into action in 2003. Simply put, it enables the government to restrict what content its citizens can read and view via IP blocking and DNS filtering. If they don’t like a site request a user makes, it won’t get viewed.
Many dismiss what’s happening in China and chalk to up to their communist political system. That could never happen in a free speech-driven, rights for all society like we have in the United States, right?
If the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) introduced this week gets enacted into law, things could change negatively for Americans which is why Dyn opposes the bill.
Read More11.18.2011 By Jeremy Hitchcock
Raising Expectations In DNS, Email And Data Availability
In thinking through some blog topics recently amidst some 2012 planning, the word ‘expectations’ came to mind. What do we expect to be next year? What do we expect of ourselves and most importantly, what do the clients and customers of Dyn expect out of us?
We are an Internet Infrastructure company that focuses on website uptime and best-in-class email delivery for those that want to meet the expectations of the masses. When people visit Netflix to organize their queue, they expect to be able to do that without pain. When a Tumblr user wants to blog about their kids, the expectation is the CMS Is available to do that. When Carrier Pigeon sells email services to clients, their expectation is that clients will be able to send large volumes of email without running into problems.
As we have continued to evolve on the Internet, expectations have been raised across the board. This is how we try and suggest that they are met.
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