Mariano tells me that it is important to keep your siteops well fed, because they are the ones that make us software programmers look good. SiteOps keeps your machines running and when you’re as big as Tagged, that means five people on call 24-7 maintaining hundreds of machines for you.

Things went ugly on Wednesday when us and half the Web 2.0 world went down because 365Main failed—“World’s Finest Data Centers”? Give me the second tier then—at least they won’t have three backup generators failing at once on the same day they issue a press release bragging about their two years of continuous uptime. Fuckers.

And even though our SiteOps was first on the scene, they couldn’t get in because the power outage locked the doors as they watched helplessly as the co-location decided to play five-year-old with the power on our server tier—machines never designed to be powered off at all. As the folks at uncov said:

“The only real victims of yesterday’s outage are the poor sysadmins who had to line up outside the datacenter to make sure their machines came up correctly. I really feel for these guys, they’re the only people in Web 2.0 who are doing honorable work.”

True dat.

Recovering from that hell, plus a scheduled power upgrade this weekend, and prep work for a massive site-wide software upgrade means that our poor SiteOps is going to be very busy this week in order to make me look good. So when I heard that it is System Administrator Appreciation Day, I thought it’d be apropos if I gifted them some clearly addictive substances in order to get SiteOps on my side—in this case a dozen cookies from Specialty’s.

Specialty’s
Financial District, San Francisco, California

Apple iPhone

Keep your sysadmins happy!

Now don’t you wish you worked at Tagged? 😀