Hi, my name is Kevin Lawver and I’ve been at Rails Machine for almost a month now. I would have written a blog post sooner, but I’ve been busy learning things. I came to Rails Machine from a startup here in Savannah where I was CTO (and sysadmin and lead developer and project manager, etc) and have known the Rails Machine guys for a couple of years, so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into when I took this job. I didn’t.

I knew there would be the usual “new guy” transition: learning how things work, internal processes, etc. What I didn’t bank on was getting to know dozens of Rails apps intimately in a couple of weeks, or the massive amounts of git-fu involved in managing deployments of hundreds of apps and servers, or all the systems used to deploy, monitor, troubleshoot and fix hundreds of servers.

It’s exciting, to say the least. I’ve learned more about git in three weeks than I did in the three years before that. I’ve re-learned everything I forgot about profiling slow MySQL queries and then some (remember, kids, indexes are your friends). And all of that on top of learning all about Moonshine, the magic glue that keeps all those servers up to date with the latest versions of everything and make sure they can talk to everything they need to make things work.

The best part is, I love all of it. There’s a huge adrenaline rush in figuring out where problems are and then fixing them quickly and well.

Oh, and did I mention how much fun learning is? Because it’s awesome. Working at Rails Machine is a crash course in scaling apps and operational badassery, and I’ve just scratched the surface. You might want to think about working here too…

Speaking of learning, I’m going to try to blog here regularly on things I learn, trends I see in the things our customers face and some of the lessons I’ve learned over the years on growing Rails apps from my laptop to a bunch of servers.