I Am So Smart: S-M-R-T … S-M-A-R-T

By the time everyone returned from the Christmas break, the company was, as Robin used to say, "firing on all cylinders." Everyone was working crazy hours, especially our systems guys (who seemed to be building half a dozen new servers every day, never mind the normal tasks of installing new network appliances—the ones that didn't fall off the truck when being delivered, that is—and managing terabytes of storage) and our crack QA team, who were charged with testing each new piece as it was completed and came online. I was still fighting with both Perl extensions and Apache modules at this point, which were functional but still had some lingering bugs on the data reporting side. To me, it was an exercise in banging my head against a wall repeatedly: I just wanted it to be done. In all honesty, I was kind of jealous of Degenhardt, too: even though we had spec'd out the concurrency service together, he was the one who got to implement it. It was actually probably better that way: he did a killer job and I had my hands full, but there was a little bit of longing as I struggled with Apache and Perl day after day.

We still touched base on it periodically, bouncing ideas off one another regarding how things should be implemented (or maybe it was just me asking him questions so that I could feel like I still knew what was going on!), and one of the cooler things he did—and this was typical BMD—was to use representative MP3 files for error conditions. As ...

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