In preparation for the new Seattle launch this Monday we’ve updated getHardwareList() to return a “Location” string at the end of the return array. Location reads “Dallas” for servers in Dallas and strangely enough it reads “Seattle” for servers in Seattle. It’s great to see all this prep-work coming together, though I think we developers will need a nap once the dust settles. In the mean time there’s always Monster.

By now I hope y’all have heard the big announcement about our new Seattle datacenter. We in the dev team got wind of it a few weeks back during one of our super-exciting and ever-informative departmental meetings. The news was met with cheers and sighs. Cheers came because, hey, the first new city is a big deal. We’re growing like crazy. These are some really exciting times for us.

It’s easy to imagine building a datacenter. Find a decent-sized room, throw some raised flooring tiles and cable management around, fill it full of racks, servers, air conditioning, and the like. Slap an Internet connection on top of it, then open the floodgates and relax while the cash flows in. Easy cheesy, right? Wrong! Boy howdy, Pete there’s tons to do, and I’m not just talking about the hardware. I’m talking about the portal.

Our portal is awesome. You can do near anything in it. We absolutely love it. We know y’all love it too, and we want to spread that love to Seattle. All of a sudden servers, vlans, users, and the like have a new and huge differentiator: cities.

Sighs in the meeting came from those of us who realized that every page, ever server, every report, every… well.. everything must be “location aware”. What’s more is we have employees in two places now. We’ve got to make sure that a RAM upgrade on a server in Seattle, but scheduled in Dallas for midnight Central Time actually happens at 10PM Pacific Time. I don’t mind that really. Time zones are one of those features that were on the to-do list but weren’t a super priority. Its nice to get that out of the way. Adding cities into our location code has been challenging in some places, but never overwhelming. It’s getting done and getting done right.

There’s a little under two weeks before the grand opening of the Seattle datacenter, and the dev team is right on schedule. Time zones are already in place, and most of the page changes are coded and in testing. When we flip the big switch up north you can be sure the portal is ready to go.