Phusion Blog

For the past few weeks, Luuk Hendriks has been working with us as a system administrator. Having worked with him before on a shared project, we are confident that he will be a competent and valueable addition to our team. It is with much delight that we welcome him. In this blog post he will introduce himself to the world.

Enter neckbeard

For a couple weeks now I, Luuk, am working with the guys at Phusion. A while ago I met Hongli and Ninh at the University of Twente during a project that involved a lot of coding, and the vibe was good. They could use some help at their operations and system administrations at Phusion, so I stopped shaving to gain some nerd cred. From my work with Ruby and Rails it was no surprise I already knew them: Ruby Enterprise Edition, Phusion Passenger, those are things you won’t easily miss. Working with these guys sounded like a great oppurtunity, so here I am.

In short, I’m a Telematics masters student at the University of Twente. My main interests in this area are highly available, scalable systems in networking and the web, and everything that is needed to realise them. Languages I like to hack in include Ruby and Haskell, although I sometimes try to find inner peace on lower levels doing some Z80 assembly on an old ZX Spectrum 48k (with varying success, to be very honest, but how bad-ass is that old nifty machine). As caffeine is part of most nerds’ daily toolkit, I feel obliged to show my weapon of choice:

Pure black, of course, with Arch Linux, AwesomeWM and zsh on the side completing my geek palate.

Besides my nerdy interests I can spend all my free time on collecting and listening to vinyl records (especially psych/kraut/free-jazz stuff), tinker with hifi equipment (again, with varying success, but that’s part of the charm right?), and playing the guitar. If ever Phusion will stop its current operations and become an 80’s glamrock band, I’m ready.

But for now, Phusion will continue to do what you know them for, and more. The soon to be released Union Station is one of the exciting things coming up, and it’s one of the projects I’m currently working on. When this comes out of Beta, we need a nice production cluster to support it, and we want to be able to replace or add servers without any significant downtime. This is where I come in, using the well-known Chef framework. It is a great way to get started on a project you are new to: for the new guy (that would be me), it is a great hands-on experience with all the aspects of the project, in both the software and the hardware supporting it. Writing Chef recipes, all of these parts will show up sooner or later, so it is a nice way to get familiar with a running project. But it is also a fresh look, a new perspective in an existing, maybe few years old, creation. Bi-winning.

Furthermore a new flavour of Phusion Passenger will be available shortly: Phusion Passenger Enterprise. Details will follow in the near future, but it’s going to come with many features that people have long asked for. It’s going to be released on July 24. Currently I’m stress testing an experimental branch, and things look promising. Be sure to keep an eye out for this one if you like your web apps served hot ‘n steamy.

All in all, there are a lot of exciting things at Phusion to keep me busy, with a nice and skilled team of people to support and guide me. Let’s see where things go from here. Be sure to get your BubbleConf tickets while the early bird reduction is still available, and meet me at the beautiful Tsuschinski in October. Just spot the neckbeard.