Sysadmin Day

Remember when we used to have all those problems with the site going slow, being down, blogs disappearing, polio, et cetera? I do, but it’s a thankfully fading memory. Lately our internal and external measuring tools have been showing all services as pretty rock solid, and when something does go wrong the right folks are notified immediately wherever they are in the world.

This is the result of a lot of work on part of our whole team, but one man in particular: Barry Abrahamson. You may not know much about him, and he doesn’t blog too much, but he’s the systems expert that has made things around here so dang smooth lately and instituted measures so we’ll be able to scale gracefully as you guys keep making more blogs and getting more pageviews.

Why mention this? Well first to let you guys know that since our last batch of problems a few months ago (the Easter blog massacre), we’ve been working really hard behind the scenes to minimize that chances of anything like that happening again in the future. It’s a process that is never “finished” but I’ve been sleeping a lot easier with the new infrastructure in place.

Second, today is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Barry, we love ya. Thank you for the long hours, late nights, and infinite patience.