Today, we are announcing Anton Koldaev as the newest member of our operations team! Anton hails from Moscow and recently worked at the first Russian-based cloud hosting company.
In David’s recent post on remote working, there were a number of comments about investing in more junior or less experienced individuals. Anton is 24 and a great example of that and quickly won us over during his 30 day trial as a junior member of our team.
How we hired Anton
Anton saw our job board post via an old colleague’s tweet and responded with a well-written email to us. We reviewed his resume and gave a traditional operations task to complete: Deploy Redmine to EC2 using Chef, and document the process.
Anton not only did an excellent job from the operational side of things, he was the only applicant to use the Redmine instance to document his work. In addition, he was the only applicant to take a page from tally and build a little Campfire integration for code pushes, deployment notifications, etc.
Impressed with Anton’s work on the trial project, each member of the team had a chat with him on Skype. (We also talked to his references who all had great things to say.) As a team we agreed that Anton would be a good contractor, and offered him a 30 day trial.
Anton started with documentation, and worked his way through projects such as upgrading our Chef server, deploying new hardware for Basecamp and rebuilding our staging database servers. Near the end of his trial, Anton was able to get a visa to visit Will in the UK for a week of co-working and in depth learning about our operations.
Welcome Anton!
Last year, we suffered a number of service outages due to network problems upstream. In the past 9 months we have diligently worked to install service from additional providers and expand both our redundancy and capacity. This week we turned up our third Internet provider, accomplishing our goals of circuit diversity, latency reduction and increased network capacity.
We now have service from Server Central / Nlayer Networks, Internap and Level 3 Communications. Our total network capacity is in excess of 1.5 gigabits per second, while our mean customer facing bandwidth utilization is between 500 megabits and 1 gigabit. In addition, we’ve deployed two Cisco ASR 1001 routers which aggregate our circuits and allow us to announce our /24 netblock (our own IP address space) via each provider.
Keeping Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire available to you at all times is our top priority, and we’re always looking for ways to increase redundancy and service performance. This setup has prevented at least 4 significant upstream network issues from becoming customer impacting… which we can all agree is great!
We are looking for two more people to join our operations team. We would prefer individuals interested in both application development and systems engineering. We’ve got 100’s of servers running Ubuntu, 400+ terabytes of Isilon storage, and we’re building out a second site. We use lots of “bare metal” in addition to VMware virtualization and some of the Amazon and Rackspace Cloud services.
Come work with us at 37signals and do the best work of your career.
Want more information? Check out this post on the Job Board.
Yesterday Eron Nicholson joined John, Will, and me on our operations team!
Recently Eron’s work included building and maintaining several multi-data center installations for a green energy startup. In addition to wearing the hardware hat, Eron was responsible for networking, monitoring and systems administration. As if those duties weren’t enough, Eron also developed internal tools and did other software design (including embedded systems).
We are really looking forward to Eron’s work on our monitoring and high availability systems.
Welcome Eron!
PS Hat tip to Nic at Newrelic for introducing us to Eron.
PPS Eron hails from North Carolina and enjoys racing … of a different variety (24 Hours of Lemons).
We’re looking for another person to join our operations team. We would prefer someone in the United States who is interested in both application development and systems engineering.
You will automate Sysadmin tasks with Chef, troubleshoot application performance issues with New Relic, and create new tools to make things run more smoothly and efficiently. You’ll also be expected to participate in an on-call rotation after you’re fully up to speed (traditionally 1 to 2 months).
Want more information? Check out this post on the Job Board.
We’re excited to announce another new addition to our team: Will Jessop, who pings from Manchester in the UK, is now the second EU engineer on our Operations team.
Will comes from Engine Yard where he provided scaling and support expertise for Rails sites such as Seeking Alpha, Groupon and KgbKgb. Recently Will worked on a senior team tasked with live migrating more than half of Engine Yard’s private cloud customers to a new cloud platform. It’s going to be great to have another member of the team with such deep understanding of application development and systems implementation practices.
With the addition of Will, we’ll have a lot more ability to conduct off-hours maintenance and scalability testing. He will also be helping us improve deployment practices, standardize our applications on the latest Ruby, and improve performance of our applications in Europe and the rest of the non-US world.
Welcome aboard, Will!
