Falling Behind

Wednesday, October 23, 2013, at 03:16AM

By Eric Richardson

It's funny sometimes how easy it is to fall behind personally in the very things that we do professionally.

At Emcien, my main role these days involves creating the processes we use to build our servers and infrastructure. That means a lot of building server images and a lot of thinking about how to make sure our environments are always running up to their potential. I spend a lot of my day writing recipes to make sure that we don't have to worry about our systems and whether a deploy was done correctly.

So imagine my surprise when I logged onto my long-neglected personal server yesterday and realized how much it was the antithesis of all those principles I stick to at work.

It's running Ubuntu 11.10, which hit end-of-life back in May. Services were cobbled together using a variety of screen sessions. Ruby, Node.js and MySQL are all ancient.

Obviously that's natural in many ways: you're more likely to put the work in when you're paid to do it than you are in your free time, and the rewards for doing the work are higher when you're talking about dozens of servers than they are when you're only managing one.

Still, there has to be some kind of a life lesson here, right? The things we do when we're in private eventually catch up to us?

As for me, I need to get going on building up some new server recipes.