Tech support as if it mattered

By Michael Fraase

Sunday, 11 May 2008 04:06PM CST

Section: Business

ExpressionEngineTwo things about software: it all has bugs and it’s all more complicated than you think. Or at least than I think. Or something. Yesterday, at 5:45PM I received an email from the chief technology officer of the vendor of the software I use to run this website. He told me that someone had reported a security vulnerability to them (just the kind of message you want to get at the end of a long day).

Turns out the vulnerability had been resolved two major versions and three years ago but I hadn’t managed my updates properly and needed to fix a few things immediately.

Instead of treating me like a dumbass who rarely realizes he’s in way over his head, Derek merely made some suggestions. At 3:45PM on what I bet was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Portland. Well, EllisLab principals are geographically dispersed, and I’m not sure where, exactly, he’s located, but I’ll bet there were any number of things he’d rather be doing than telling me my server has a security issue. Imagine my surprise when he didn’t even make fun of me for running his elegant software on a rickety old Windows enterprise server box that I’ve been trying to migrate to Ubuntu for more than a year. But now I’m thinking a Mac, but that’s a story for another day.

And just to top things off, he checked in again this morning—Sunday—to double-check my fixes.

So, hearty thanks, Derek. What a delightful surprise to find that on the verge of another tech bubble burst, there’s still great software and better people working on it.

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