i have heard you humans speak of a thing called a "weekend"

[rone]

Today marked about 8 hours of work.  Tomorrow might well be the same, as well as next Saturday, and the Saturday and Sunday after that.  Only next Sunday will be free, as i will be seeing Kimmy walk her half-marathon in San Francisco.

So what's happening?  Well, i was hired at Visible Path to help build a new datacenter which will host the new version of our product.  Things were well planned out, but every available wiggle space on the time axis has been consumed by vendor-caused delays.  Thus, the crunch; the only consolation is that we get to go home at night, whereas the actual developers, well, good luck, fellas.  I still feel a tad guilty for going to Ecuador at what was one of the worse times, but my boss has waved my concerns off.  So far, we're doing well, and we are far from panic.  But there's no time for letting up; the product launch date is Oct 30, except that upper management wants stuff live on the 28th.

As a sysadmin, i can't think of a better opportunity than building a datacenter from scratch.  You get the chance to set everything up the way you want it, instead of having to put up with cable spaghetti or rack layouts designed by monkeys on Valium or the sinking realization that whoever chose the colocation facility only did it because he was shtupping the salesperson.  We have a good team and our eyes, brains, and hands seem to overlap in the right spots.  It's a good thing.

Comments

pardon me while I chuckle in empathy

[madmerle.livejournal.com]

Oh, I can so relate to at least some of this after tearing down Wetware's data center (http://madmerle.livejournal.com/6728.html) all by myself, although being of above average intelligence and experience, Andy and Drieux had been pretty damn smart about organizing the cable spaghetti when they originally put the lab together, or it would have taken me a lot longer than six hours to dismantle.

Glad to hear your team is working like a well-oiled machine. Hope you get your weekends back soon!

[hwrnmnbsol.livejournal.com]

Excellent. As the design of data centers is something I do for a living, I'm curious about the nuts and bolts of what you're building. When you get a spare second, drop me a line and tell me the basics of your power and cooling systems.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Well, we're technically not building the facility, just the cage. We're being hosted by Equinix, at a new facility of theirs in San Jose; thus, all power and cooling is handled by them. All we had to do was tell them how many kVA we needed. The cooling here seems to work better than at the other place of theirs i've worked in; there, i had to double-layer because the HVAC dumped right on top of our cage. Here, there's raised floors.

[ptomblin-lj.livejournal.com]

I've been doing 55 hours billable every week for the last 5. As far as I can see, this is going to continue into December, although the customer wants it be the end of October. Yeah, I'd like my weekends back too, but the money is good. At least for the last couple of weeks, I've been able to do the extra hours from home, thanks to the miracle of a USB thumb drive with all the source code on it.