Im only twenty three years old, yet I have a six month old child. Mom, if you are reading don’t freak out! My child isn’t human, its my startup. The analogy between startups and children has been made by many, but today I learned intimately about a few similarities.

Lately, traffic on JamLegend has been growing and we have been experiencing growing pains with our servers. Occasionally things just spontaneously combust while under high load so my co-worker, Ryan, set up a script to monitor our server and literally say out loud “Oh noes! JamLegend is down!” when the server explodes.

Last night, before I went to sleep, I could tell that something on our database server wasn’t quite right. We had recently switched to a new machine so I left my speakers on loud enough so I could be alerted if something blew up. Sure enough, only about 30 minutes after I put my head down, our new baby server started to wail.

I rolled out of bed and trudged over to my computer to remedy the server but quickly discovered that it wouldn’t be a quick fix like usual. I’ll spare the details, but it took quite a bit of poking around before I was able to get a grasp of the root of the problem, and no, it wasn’t a dirty diaper.

After fumbling around enough to get the crying to stop I couldn’t simply abandon the machine. I had to sit and make sure that it stayed calm and didn’t act up any more. In fact, I actually waited until a good portion of the database connections were sleeping before I finally laid back down.

I thought I was off the hook, but sadly our servers woke me up several more times that night. The experience makes me appreciate all the work parents go though, especially since you cant htop, ps, or reboot a baby. I’m just hoping that my baby will grow out of this phase soon.