The time I literally dropped a server
This is a short story about one of the stupidest things I ever did in my professional life, namely, dropping a physical server from the top of the rack in a data center. Spring feels like my favorite season, not because it beats summer, but because it carries the promise of summer. In spring I'm so happy that the depressing gray days of winter are coming to an end. Early 2014 I was driving from the Mendix office in Rotterdam to our co-location data center (DC for short) in Amsterdam. I felt fantastic, for a couple of reasons: I was driving my new car, I was paid to do an important job with a $10k 1U server in the boot, and as the cherry on top, it was finally spring and the weather was great! There have not many times in my life I felt this wonderful. Little did I know that I was now at the top of a rollercoaster, and on the way back I would feel very different. All of the physical servers at Mendix had Pokemon names. The one in my car was called Flareon. It had broken ...