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 is my favorite season, summer is actually better, but in spring it's clear that winter is over and summer is coming up. In 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, and 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 down a couple of weeks before and had gotten fixed by Hans, our ...