Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

We, as engineers, are frequently faced with solving business problems, or sometimes technology problems, that really move the needle. We, as engineers, are usually never happy with any of the technologies in our tool chest. There is a place for every technology, but it always seems like our favorite technologies fall behind the cool kids in the block.

It is attractive to bet on emerging technologies. They are sexy, cool, promising high productivity gains, and in a way, good technologies are disruptive, not only to the technology landscape, but to the business landscape, since they change what can be achieved with technology.

And so, we feel inclined to risk and pick emerging technologies, without perhaps taking the time and consciously analyze and understand the impact. To list a few things:

• How many developers can I find with the required skills to support this technology? Where are they located? Are those locations where I can attract and retain talent?
• How secure and proven is the technology? Is there a good track record of fixing security bugs in very short time-frames?
• How complex is it to deploy this technology? How stable is it and what is the monitoring and analytics required to operate it?
• How long would it take to migrate everybody in my company/group/division/org from the “old” stuff to this “new” stuff? Does it pay off?
• How long would it take to migrate my project from this “new” stuff to the “old” stuff? Does it make sense that I even start doing it?

Unfortunately, many times the answer to these questions leads to a categoric deception: we can do with the old technology, and that there is no need to introduce “new” stuff. While we should be trained to accept this outcome, we are not, and end up choosing the new cool and sexy stuff instead.

Picking stable, mature technology, despite its known shortcomings, should be the most traveled route for engineers, but unfortunately it is not. Specially in the context of startups, there is a desire to play with new technologies, somehow associating business innovation with technology risk.

Unfortunately, these risky technology choices later become heavy burdens that cost the venture either big bucks for paying star “talent” developers, big bucks for hardware and operations, or very low availability. In some cases, the technology might even become a dead-end and a re-engineering exercise is required anyway.

So, next time around, let’s try to think beyond our desk, and into the long-term implications whenever we chose a technology.

We got a new au pair in January from Spain, Andrea Ayuso Morillo, for our daughter. Our previous au pair had been Finnish, and Anaïs did learn pretty good language skills from her. We now wanted a Spanish girl to take care of our daughter Anaïs, to ensure her Spanish would improve. We found Andrea on a specialized site, au-pair world, and after a few calls and email exchanges she seemed like a really nice girl.

She came to the UK, and she seemed reliable and hard working. She was also imposing a bit of more authority in Anaïs, I guess a good thing too. We thought she was happy. But obviously we were wrong.

We spent last weekend in Finland, and returned on Sunday night. Andrea had disappeared. Her room was empty, all her belongings gone. And only one note to tell us that she was quitting. No notice, no discussion. No nothing.

She has now fully removed any traces. She has removed my wife as a connection from gmail. She has removed her profile from the au pair world where we first found her, and now we know that she posted an update in January looking for a new place in London. And she also posted her profile on another couple of sites. Yes, we know, Andrea. Even if you removed it, you cannot change the past. That’s what the search engines cache is for.

So here is the thing, Andrea, you might be the best child caretaker in the world. You might be the best in social services. You might be friendly and good at your job. But you are not trust worthy. And trust, with a child, is the most important thing.

Andrea, nobody will trust you unless you grow up and find ways to discuss and communicate, to negotiate. You won’t get far by being a coward, hiding away without daring to confront people. And yes, we are angry. Had you told us you were leaving, we would have understood, and planned for it. End of the story. All we needed was notice. You were paid for a week, and left half way through, and without notice. Besides this constituting a breach of contract, you behaved like a teenager. Shame on you, our daughter is more mature than you, being 27!

So why I am posting this? Firstly because you, Andrea, need to become accountable for your actions. You see, I just need to post this and let the search bots crawl my site, something that happens several times a day. And within a few days, this posting will be showing on the search results pages for Yahoo! and Google when people look for your name. Even a few years later, this post will still exist, and folks looking for references will find it.

Secondly, because I hope that by reading this other parents may not follow our own fate. If you are a parent reading this and Andrea is taking care of your children, take a minute or two to reflect about our story. Because it could happen to you too. One day, you wake up, and Andrea is gone, leaving you and your child in a really difficult situation.

Update (2008-03-02): It seems like Andrea’s experience has improved dramatically since she left us a few weeks ago - she’s gone from looking for au pair positions to aspiring to become a nanny.

This is mostly to recruiters and speculators alike. No, I have not been laid off. No, I don’t know anything about the Microsoft bid. And no, I am not moving.

So that’s clear: I love Yahoo!, and we have kick ass engineers producing kick ass technology. We rock, man! We are so cool!

I have been running this blog on a slicehost VPS with excellent results so far. However, I am at the point where I need a bit more flexibility and I can’t justify the $20 monthly fee to my home CFO. So, I did setup myself to move the server back home this weekend, where funny enough, I used to host this blog.

The first choice came down to choice of OS. I had been running Gentoo, but I have found this distribution bad for very low spec hardware. I am running on a fanless and rather exotic VIA C3 533Mhz chip, and compiling packages isn’t particularly a fast thing on this box. I tried Gentoo a couple of years back on it, and getting gcc to compile would take a couple of days. Plus at some point it stopped working because of not sufficient memory.

Going through the choices I hesitated for a while with FreeBSD, but lack of good references for my CPU made me look at the Linux side, where I considered CentOS5, Debian and Ubuntu. I did not like CentOS RPMs - I don’t any value-added on top of RHEL, and it feels odd to go free beer, but not free speech. That left Debian vs Ubuntu.

Whereas I have been relatively happy with Ubuntu as my laptop’s OS for the last three years, I don’t think Ubuntu has the necessary levels of testing required to “certify” a server OS. So I picked Debian, but instead of running stable (etch), I decided to go for test (lenny). Not as aggressive as Ubuntu, which is based on unstable (sid). Additionally, some packages I need (e.g. gmp for php) were not available in Etch.

So far, setting up the box to replicate the slicehost configuration has been relatively easy, with the exception of the MTA/IMAP which is always a pain. Have I had more memory and CPU I would have installed Zimbra. But since I am not sure my home CFO is going to be very impressed with me asking for yet another computer, I think I’ll pass on Zimbra for now.

The initial install out of a bootable USB went without complications picking a basic setup, after which I added MySQL, Apache, PHP, Postfix and Cyrus. I prefer to add the stack by hand, to control exactly what gets installed. Finally, the upgrade to lenny was also extremely smooth.

I have now finished reconfiguring all DNS records to point to my public static IP (ADSL), which works great from the outside, but mixes things up while trying to access servers from the home network. I have figured out I’ll have to setup a DNS server and overwrite the domains I serve and forward up to the ISPs everything else, but I wish there was an easier way of doing this. Yes, I could hack /etc/hosts, but I won’t. The other downside of running at home is lack of reverse DNS lookups, but I think I can live with it.

In conclusion, I am overall extremely pleased with Debian, like I was with Ubuntu. I hope a few months of service, and I’ll still be happy with it.