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Mostly helping start ups, small businesses, local libraries. I'd been doing this as a side gig for about 6 years at that point. AWS had launched in 2006 and in 2007 I started to see a lot of my sysadmin gigs dry up. "Our developers can do all that themselves now, we don't need you."

At the time I was young and naive and figured that was that. I limped along for a few years. Then in 2010 I saw a huge surge in new business. The story was always the same: "We were wrong, it turns out reliability/scaling/production readiness isn't easy. Please help. We're in trouble."

It took 2 years to go from "We're in a new easy-button world" to "Oh my god what have we done." Jer and PocketOS were themselves just trying to run a small business and do the best they can. They trusted their infrastructure (and now development) providers. They weren't wrong to do it.

What everyone will start learning (again) is the other side of the equation: We're responsible and accountable for our work to our customers and the latest tech isn't a shortcut. It's a risk. Reliability is *challenging* on a good day. Most days it feels Sisyphean. You can't skip the humans here.

Someone has to build the last line of defense. Someone has to ensure the fail safes are properly gapped. Someone has to assume the entire system is adversarial and protect the customers. We've seen this story many times before. In 20 years someone else will be writing this story on $new_thing.

27/4/26, 10:12 am0 reposts4 likes