OT: It's arrived!

[Matt S Trout]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 01:30:00PM +0000, Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> I agree, I just get the feeling from a lot of the replies that people 
> think I'm incapable of learning. I could be wrong, but it's the tone 
> I've been picking up.

My original comment that you should hire a sysadmin wasn't suggesting you
should get somebody full time.

The thought I had in mind was that you could pay a specialist to get your
platform to the point where it was of reasonable quality to match the
expectations of commercial clients and maybe retain a few hours a week/month
from them to keep things ticking over.

Then, assured that things aren't going to explode under you, you'd have more
time to learn the ropes yourself.

We make a lot of our money helping out people who're developing web projects
with Catalyst who know they -can- learn but want to have experts around so
they don't end up making mistakes while they're learning that'll slow the
project down and/or torpedo it later when they have to maintain it. We've had
several of them learn enough from working with our team that they no longer
need our services. That's fine with us - it proves we did our job as
consultants and they invariably go on to provide us with more new business
via recommendations.

In fact, our sysadmin was originally just doing a few hours a week on contract;
however as the company scaled up and we found that a lot of our clients needed
help sorting out their development and deployment platforms as well as their
codebase, it became sensible to take him on full time. These days we've got
so much systems work we're starting to pull in extra sysadmin hours on
contract again ... and so goes the process of building a business.

-- 
      Matt S Trout       Need help with your Catalyst or DBIx::Class project?
   Technical Director                    http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/catalyst/
 Shadowcat Systems Ltd.  Want a managed development or deployment platform?
http://chainsawblues.vox.com/            http://www.shadowcat.co.uk/servers/