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About the Book

Growing Up is targeted at technical owners and employees of potential to small web-oriented businesses. If you are:

• Serving primarily dynamic content at less than 30 requests per second,
• Terrified of being linked to from the Reddit homepage, or
• Wondering when you should get around to hiring a sysadmin to manage your servers,

you will probably find this book useful.

While not entirely technical, Growing Up focuses primarily on problems with the technical side of a business; a non-technical CEO will find this more useful in the hands of their lead developer.

In a similar fashion, the advice in this book is aimed at running a web site. Not all software is written for the web (in particular, mobile has seen a big boom recently), but it’s still the primary method of delivering a service to users, and the one most favored by startups. Some information will be useful to an engineer working on native applications, but be ready to skip over large chunks that aren’t relevant to you.

You're going to need to get your hands dirty.  You'll be writing code, modifying configuration files, and installing software (perhaps from source). You should be at least basically comfortable with your entire stack, from Javascript to web server, and shouldn't be afraid of using the terminal to administrate your servers.  Most importantly, you need to be prepared to do some research on any topic we cover that's a weak point for you.  Space and knowledge constraints prevent me from writing about everything you need to know, but I'll liberally scatter references to other resources, mostly free, that I've found helpful for my own education.

About the Author

James Pearson Hughes

@xiongchiamiov

James is a Purveyor of Fine Linens and Unix Sorcery at iFixit and Dozuki, which is a fancy way of saying he's a Web Operations Engineer. He is particularly interested in failure analysis, security, and performance, and, most importantly, the human aspect of each of these.

Good thoughts are useless if not communicated with the rest of the world. On his primary website, changedmy.name, he writes about the effects of people on software, and software on people. Musings on religion and philosophy go to The Fucking Bible, while purely technical live on iFixit's developer blog, It Broke and iFixit. Lastly, he communicates on a wide variety of forums and mailing lists, most notably Reddit, where he spends much of my time trying to help steer future developers to a happy career.