… life is hectic these days, but in a good way. Almost every day and every evening brings new and unusual events. And most are good 😉

The weekend started with a bit of a bummer, when a friend I was hoping would join us as an internet marketing expert at HubSpot decided to head in another direction. But it’s OK, we’ll live 😉

On Tuesday, I went to the System Design and Management (SDM) program’s information session for prospective students. They have one of these every couple of months or so, and I like them a lot. I found it useful as a prospective student, and now I try to give back to the community by helping answer questions from the next generation of fellows. As a graduate of the best engineering management education program out there, I want to spread the word.

Having gone to a few of these events, I’m starting to see consistent patterns and themes in the questions. Those are the subject of a separate blog post, though.

On Wednesday I finally got in mind a stable mental model for how I wanted to implement a significant new piece of HubSpot’s software. I can’t quite talk about it yet, since it hasn’t launched, but it will be very cool. More on that later.

Then Amazon released its Elastic Block Service. As an enthusiastic user of their Elastic Cloud (EC2) service, this is a great addition. It’s a missing piece I had been looking for. I promptly used it within 12 hours of its release to set up an automated backup sync’ing job for our build server (which runs on EC2). It works great. Fast, cheap, reliable: that’s hard to beat.

On the topic of build servers, I’m liking Hudson more and more over time. My one request right now is a separation of config files from build artifacts in $HUDSON_HOME, so I can more easily do the above backup script for only config files.

Yesterday was also a good day. We made good progress at work, interviewed a couple of promising engineers, and got plenty of PR, as Rick notes.

I’ve more of less come to accept I can’t blog daily any more. It’s not because I don’t want to. There’s just so much exciting, cool stuff going on. It’s a rare opportunity to work at a startup that’s really growing exponentially, and I want to be fully immersed.