Under the Hood: Introducing Rich

Since we started in May 2004, we have been relying on our own smarts, and our teams at Rackspace, to manage our servers and infrastructure. In those nearly four years we have had two windows of unscheduled downtime — not perfect, but pretty good for a growing web service.

That said, we have some big goals to achieve over the next while, so we knew we needed to deepen our network and operations capabilities with someone in-house full-time. Enter Rich Lafferty, the man who had me at “hello”.

Had you at “hello”? That doesn’t sound quite right…

Hang in there, and allow me to elaborate. In the final quarter of last year we did a lot of interviews, and the more you do something, the better you get at it. We had been struggling to find a systems administrator; the best candidates tended to be stationed in other countries. Then Rich entered our little office. Just like the day we met Aaron, I just sort of knew Rich was our guy. I wasn’t even involved with the first interview, we just said a passing “hello” — and funny enough, that was pretty much all I needed. Don’t get me wrong, we did our due diligence and I was involved with later interviews; but right off the bat, I just knew he was a fit.

Rich started in early December, and his impact was felt immediately. I guess our needs are growing beyond the realm where a generalist is the best fit. Now we need people with deep domain expertise, and Rich has fundamentally changed our confidence levels in all things network related. Our dev team is able to run a heck of a lot faster with someone now dedicated to operations.

We’re delighted to have Rich here in Toronto with us, along with his wife Candice, who just arrived from Ottawa this weekend. Please join me in welcoming him to team FreshBooks!