Title: November 19, 2007 - Tech’s New Normal or Just Another Wave?

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Hey everyone,

I woke up on a Friday in late November 2007 and the tech world was buzzing. GitHub was just launching (well, it would be next year, but rumors were flying), Hadoop was gaining steam, and cloud computing was starting to shake things up. It felt like every day brought a new startup or service trying to make waves. And let’s not forget about that iPhone SDK—it seemed so far-fetched, yet there it was.

At my day job, we were still wrestling with colo vs. AWS EC2/S3 debates. The cloud wasn’t mainstream yet, but it sure was starting to look promising. We had a small team working on moving our infrastructure from physical servers in a colocation facility to virtual machines hosted by Amazon. It was exciting and scary all at once.

One of the biggest challenges we faced was trying to convince everyone that virtual machines weren’t just some temporary solution. The ops team, with their years of experience running servers, were skeptical. Meanwhile, the developers wanted more flexibility and less overhead in setting up new environments. We ended up writing scripts to automate the VM provisioning process, which helped bridge the gap a bit.

The agile vs. scrum debate was raging on in various circles. I found myself in meetings where “waterfall” was still thrown around like an insult, even though no one really knew what it meant anymore. The line between development and ops was blurring, but not fast enough for some people’s liking. We were already working closely with the dev team, setting up monitoring tools to keep an eye on our services round the clock.

Then there was the hiring freeze. Our company had been doing well, but like many others, we felt the pinch of the economic crash starting to hit us hard. Layoffs and cutbacks were becoming more common, which made for some tense discussions about the future. It wasn’t an easy time to convince people that our tech stack decisions would pay off in the long run.

And amidst all this, I found myself thinking a lot about co-founders and why they seemed so trendy. I remember reading “Absolutely, DO NOT, get a co-founder!” on Hacker News. The article was written from someone’s personal experience and it hit home for me. Co-founders are great if you can find the right person, but it’s easy to see how things could go south quickly.

One night, I sat down and wrote out some pros and cons of starting a company myself versus finding a co-founder. I knew what I wanted—complete control over my projects and ideas—but there were definite benefits to having someone by your side, especially when the going got tough.

I also spent time reading up on The PayPal Mafia. It was fascinating to learn about all these tech luminaries who had built companies from scratch or joined forces with each other. They seemed like a mix of geniuses and entrepreneurs, and it made me wonder what I could contribute if given the right opportunity.

In my personal life, I was trying to balance work with some side projects I’d been working on. One of them involved setting up a small web application using Rails. It felt good to have something to focus on outside of the day job. Maybe I’d even open-source it someday…

Looking back at that time, November 2007 feels like the dawn of many changes in tech. GitHub’s launch would eventually change how we share and manage code. Hadoop’s popularity would grow as big data became more than just a buzzword. And cloud computing was about to become ubiquitous, reshaping our approach to infrastructure.

Those were exciting times, full of uncertainty and potential. Sometimes it felt like every decision we made had to be perfect or risk falling behind. But hey, that’s the spirit of tech—always pushing boundaries, always trying something new.

Hope you’re all doing well in your own adventures. Let’s keep hacking!

Cheers,

Brandon