Working for The Man!
So, as of today, I have accepted an offer to work for The Man. Not The Man as in, “The Man is keeping us down”, but as in “You are The Man!”. Except, in this case, it’s more like The Company. 
Starting soon (hopefully Friday, if everything is ready to go) I’ll be working for Planet Argon. I’m being brought in as a sysadmin for their hosting operations. There are lots of really exciting opportunities going on here not only in the world of Ruby on Rails hosting in particular, but hosting services in general.
Companies like DreamHost have really redefined what one-click installations are all about, but I’m looking to take that further. Not just one-click hosting, but one-click virtual servers. Imagine filling out a form, submitting some billing info, and having a full-blown, ready to go virtual server available for your use (with root access to boot) within a few minutes.
With technologies like Xen allowing lightweight virtual machines, I’m hoping that we’ll soon be able to make this a reality. No more being confined to your $HOME, and trying to install software that isn’t supported by the hosting service within those confines. You’ll now be able to install software as it was MEANT to be installed, and just have it work.
With more and more Web 2.0 (is that cliché yet?) applications coming up, and with more and more developers designing said applications, it’ll be even more important to have an easy and reliable platform for hosting these applications. It’s obviously going to take some hard work and time to get it done, but I think it’ll really be a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Stay tuned for more about this.
Obviously, these are just my opinions and not the policy of Planet Argon, yadda, yadda. Same goes for any future work-related posts. But it’s a very exciting opportunity, and a very exciting time to be getting involved into this portion of the business.
