October 15th, 2001. I remember this date well. It felt like a somber day, even though it was just another weekday. The tech world had its share of troubles that month, with the dot-com crash sending ripples through every corner of our industry. But for me, working in ops at a small startup, it was business as usual—debugging systems and arguing over which version control system to use.

It’s been almost 20 years since I wrote this entry, but reflecting on that day still gives me a sense of nostalgia tinged with wistfulness. Back then, Linux was indeed starting to gain traction among serious ops folks. We were using Apache as our web server and Sendmail for email. BIND was the go-to tool for DNS resolution. These technologies felt robust and reliable—backbone technologies that held up even in the darkest days of 2001.

I vividly recall one particular Saturday night when a critical issue hit our production system. It was a rare weekend outage, and it happened to be just after we had deployed a new version of our application using Apache mod_perl. The logs showed requests timing out, but nothing in the Apache error logs suggested what might have gone wrong. I spent hours debugging this problem, checking configurations, tweaking settings, and even manually running some Perl scripts from the command line. Finally, around 3 AM, I managed to pinpoint the issue—it was a bug in how we were handling file descriptors with mod_perl.

That experience taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of thorough testing—especially when integrating new technologies. It also highlighted the challenges of managing production systems: you can’t just deploy and forget; every change requires careful monitoring and verification.

Speaking of deployment, I remember arguing heatedly with my team about which version control system we should use. Git was still in its infancy, but Subversion (SVN) was widely used. We were debating the merits of each—how easy they were to use, how reliable their performance would be under heavy load, and whether one might eventually win out due to community adoption. In the end, we decided to stick with SVN until Git became more mature, which turned out to be a decision we didn’t have to regret too long.

The tech world was buzzing with discussions about IPv6. Back then, it seemed like the future of internet addressing, but few were truly implementing it in production. It made me wonder how long it would take for this shift to become more mainstream. The Y2K scare had passed, yet the specter of end-of-life issues still lingered in the minds of many engineers.

Reflecting on those days, I realize how different tech culture was back then. Developers were often working with less sophisticated tools and frameworks compared to today’s standards. We didn’t have the plethora of cloud services that now dominate our industry; instead, we relied heavily on on-premises hardware and open-source software. The focus was more on building robust systems using tried-and-true technologies.

Despite the challenges, those days were formative for me as an engineer. I learned to appreciate the value of stability in infrastructure and the importance of continuous learning in a rapidly changing field. The tech world may have been darker that October day, but there was still light to be found in the simple act of writing code and fixing bugs.

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That’s it for today. The next version control wars are probably happening right now, somewhere. And who knows what future challenges await us? But for now, let’s keep pushing forward, one line at a time.