Somehow, I keep having this conversation with friends & acquaintances.  Maybe it's because I've been through several (failed) startups myself.  Maybe it's simply because I live in San Francisco and everyone here dreams about their brilliant idea that's going to make them a million dollars.

On the heels of two posts on where I'm working and the tools I'm using, I wanted to share some more general thoughts on why I love my job so much.  The perks and the pay certainly don't hurt, but honestly, if they didn't pay me, I would do this for free.

I quit.

If you know me, you know how surprising that statement is.  I've been a die-hard Linux evangalist for the past 10 years or so.  But, as Bob Dylan would say, things have changed.

I've spoken before (several times actually) about Pantheon, a high performance web host.  They're an amazing platform with many awesome features, but one lacking feature is an easy way to do local development.  Kalabox 2 promises to change this, but as we went to press Pantheon integration wasn't working yet.  The good news: there's an easy way to do this.

I was recently talking with the fine folks at UCSF.edu and they mentioned that they do updates of giant Drupal multisites.  I asked them how they manage that.  The answer: a script!  So of course I wanted one too.

Here are my steps:

At work we're still stuck on IE9.  We just started the discussion of upgrading our web browser, and Project Spartan came up.  As a web developer, there's only one thing I care about: is it compatible?

So, I made the leap from shared hosting to a virtual private server.  Why?  A few reasons:

1. You'll never get great performance from shared hosting
2. I've gained confidence in my own ability to devops
3. I'm trying to improve my skill set
4. It's actually cheaper; $7/mo for Hostgator shared hosting vs. $5/mo for Digital Ocean
5. It's fun!  (I need to get out more.)

My first reaction?