Potential.

The exercise is to embrace on the positive of both poles, and not to let one of them turn the other negative.

You've likely seen updates in the past week about the transition of gaia.com to a new cluster/server host.  Well every single piece and every moving part had to somehow be moved by human hands, and I'll tell you... they were the best hands this site could be in.

This entry is a paean to Jesse and Stephen, and all of Blue Box Group -- the new home for gaia.com.

I've probably had now 200 conversations with Jesse, over 50 with Stephen, and not once has either of them fallen short of absolute perfect communication, in terms of professionalism, accuracy, and thoroughness.

We needed handholding in many places, and never once did they let us trip.  And with all of our moving parts, not once were they stumped or did they stumble.  It was awesome to watch and be a part of, really was.

Every time they could answer the call and move above-and-beyond expectations, they did.

The night that Gaia moved over to its new servers, I was so confident that it would be done in 2 hours, I said so publicly on our team blog -- when with a job this size, I should have estimated at least 6 hours. 

The actual time to transition everything and open the doors back up?  One hour, 45 minutes.

Our site is now 3-6x faster, for 1/4 the price of service at EngineYard.  Our site satisfaction level is 97%.  You can see all the results for yourself -- just click around and see how great it runs.

Blue Box Group is also carbon neutral, having partnered with The Climate Trust.  Can these guys do no wrong?

It's been simply the best experience I've had with a company.  Any company.  In any sector.  Ever.

The 270,000 of Gaia.com send a wave of thanks :)

Gaia.com now gets a 97% (excellent) mark on the Apdex index (a measure of user satisfaction):


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apdex

That was in the 60-70s previously with EY (meaning the site response was poor to occasionally frustrating).

And just wait till we get longer queries running on a 2nd database, and on rails 2.x, and eventually ruby 1.9 (which is twice as fast as ruby 1.8).  Links will render before the mouse button finishes raising  :D

6 times faster:


See the Response Time column.  Monday and Tuesday were before our move, Wednesday-Sunday were after.

For the geeks: Our rails solution was migrated from EngineYard to Blue Box Group. We left EY's nginx/mongrel solution for nginx/passenger.

The site is now running live on BlueBoxGroup servers, as of yesterday morning.  Mega kudos to Jesse and Stephen, and Ry and Franc from our team.  It could not have gone more perfectly.

We've always had the ambition of being a "google-fast" site.  From what I've seen today, we may have actually done it.  Time will tell.

And we still have more improvements to make -- so we have no more of those occasional slowdowns that bum everyone out.  And still a long list of little fixes, to keep this place feeling great.  Very soon to come.

So for now, all I can say is:  enjoy...  and tell your friends, especially those that hated the slow site in the past, see if they'll give us another try.  And did I say enjoy?  Hopefully that happens  :)

Answering this question... brb

Satisfaction is something you go after.  It's not something you actually want to experience (for very long, at least). 

To hear almost any vision, and translate that to a working software system.

To build a philosophy around the idea of resonance, golden moments, and magic.

To unify those.

Reading tough philosophical or intellectual tracts, then writing on them.

Building software from my ideas.

The union: philengineering.