Woohoo! I’m working in a company that’s building something again! I loved working for Pronto.com in the early days. We had a feeling of comradery and we were all working together to build something really neat and new and we were throwing ideas around and implementing all of the cool stuff with visions of sugar plumbs in our heads. :) But as Pronto.com grew and became profitable (that’s the big kicker), things changed. When the company suddenly becomes profitable, the fast-paced, mass-development efforts come to a grinding halt. “Don’t change anything!” “Don’t take the site down, no matter what!” “Don’t do anything that will cause our revenues to drop in the slightest!” The company went from “building mode” to “maintenance mode”. More levels of management immediately were hired. The world as I had known it was gone. I’m now working at http://beatport.com – the iTunes of DJ and Dance music. The company is 5 years old, profitable and still building like crazy! They’ve got a bunch of 20-somethings and 30-somethings running almost every aspect of the company and I feel a little “old” amongst all of these guys being 42 years old. They develop using the ‘Agile’ development style by Rally (developed in Boulder) which just means that they have a bunch of short meetings to keep communication flowing and have very short development windows called ‘sprints’. The developers are mostly all in their 20s and they’re eager to use the latest, greatest software and tools available to get the job done. I’ve been working there for 5 weeks now and I’ve been ‘drinking from the fire hose’ trying to learn all of the new tools and methodologies that they use. I won’t mention any of the tools that they use – mainly because I believe that giving away the tools would sort of be like giving away their I.P. since they use these new tools everywhere. In short, the engineers at Beatport are really a thrill to work with. They’re young. They’re energetic. They put in the extra hours to get something to work if they need to. It’s all of the things that I miss about the “old” Pronto. They’ve got a great team spirit because they’re building something new all of the time. They have ambition, drive and direction. I hope that Beatport can continue at the same pace for many more years and not fall into stagnation like Pronto did. The engineering problems at Beatport are even larger and harder to solve than the engineering problems at Pronto. Beatport is global. The data bandwidth and storage requirements for Beatport are thousands of times larger than at Pronto. The sysadmin tools are much more capable than what I put together at Pronto when I was in ‘build mode’ for them. I am actually a little ashamed that I didn’t do a better job putting together sysadmin tools that are more like what Beatport uses during my time at Pronto. They don’t just use new technology, they push it to the limit. They work smarter, not harder and let the tools to the heavy-lifting. The procedures that I put in place at Pronto in the first couple of years were meant to be simple. Anyone could understand the network or the setup without a networking degree or without having to read more than a few sentences worth of documentation. The last 3 years at Pronto, the operations group put in place many other systems that introduced more complexity and needed more people to maintain. It wasn’t ‘better’ technology, it was just ‘more’ technology. The technology at Beatport is genuinely better. It’s smarter. It makes doing more work my more fewer people possible and actually simpler to do and maintain. Simpler and better is good. Very good. It’s actually very impressive. Anyway, it’s refreshing to be part of a company that is really doing things well again. They’re building. They’re doing things the right way and the people are really fun and exciting to work with. Going to work is fun again! :)

Tweet