Kelsey Hightower

You haven't committed to an operating system yet, but you have enough to do whatever you want.

So if you want to configure the RAID controller, and back then there wasn't like clean APIs.

We were literally running curl scripts and command line utilities trying to get this machine into the right shape.

And then when we were done, we would put it into the fleet.

So at that early age, I'm like, oh, there is nothing you cannot do.

When we had to automate the Windows 2000 servers back then, we would just build tools that would literally screen scrape, log into Active Directory, and then we would screen scrape mouse movements so that way we can patch software on those Windows servers.

So the concept of like, I need a specific tool to do is like, no, back then it was like, you do whatever's necessary because these people are only paying like $99 a month.

They don't have time for you to spend a whole week when they call random customer.

You don't know their setup.

You don't know their infrastructure.

You have minutes to get them back online.

So everybody learned to move quickly.

No complaining.

When you get that ticket, it's on you to figure it out.

Maybe you lean to your teammates for help.

So I kind of learned how to move fast.

But the inflection point came from, I started that job in tech support.

So people would call, my SQL isn't working, DNS isn't working.

They can't even describe what isn't working sometimes.

And so I realized that we were all in the phone queue.