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Jun 13Outlet to the Danger Zone
by in Feature Articles on 2013-07-22Chris Q had a reputation for being a bit of a maverick. He didn't make changes directly to production, dare the two-week-old butter chicken in the back of the lunchroom fridge, or even particularly like 1986's Tom Cruise / Val Kilmer vehicle Top Gun. But as part of an elite development team that had split from Government Department's mainframe dev group, Chris couldn't help being branded "other". When he walked by, the old-school mainframe developers whispered: there went a guy who thought dangerously out of the box.
The original reason for the split was called The Internet. As the Thermodynamic Arrow of Time dragged them relentlessly towards the heat-death of the universe, Government Department needed a web presence and a modern intranet. While the budgetary committee would have been perfectly happy to somehow run the new system on the Department's existing mainframes, sanity prevailed (this time) and a new-ish PC server machine landed on Chris's doorstep. Since a majority of the senior-most developers wanted nothing to do with the newfangled equipment, the PC / Server Team was formed. While having perhaps not as much experience as the mainframe developers, Chris and co. knew their server needed an uninterruptible power supply and regular disaster-recovery testing. Every quarter, at a scheduled time, they would pull the plug on the UPS and ensure the server shut down gracefully before the batteries died. And the server always did.