I also used to work at message control. The architecture to support all of the legacy and new technology for email was very hard. Also architecting a system to ensure that it would never go down completely was a large challenge.
You also have to understand how providers deal with email to make sure delivery is never affected. We had to ensure 100% delivery and never fail.
The company I work for has maybe 20+ of the 1st generation version in our office. We even have a few of the 84 inch models. I have to say they are great to work with when you are collaborating with people and need to use a white board, video conference, or just view a web application. I can't stand using one of the few conference rooms here that does not have one anymore.
Don't forget about Chicago. There are many great universities near the Chicago Metro area with a lot of great tech companies to choose from for a job. Cost of living is less than the coasts and the salaries are on par or above for cost of living in the city if you work in technology.
This is exactly why you should design your services to run in multiple availability zones to mitigate issues like this. We run our most critical services in at least 3 availability zones and we are moving the rest of our services soon as well. While these problems are unfortunate, it is part of relying on Amazon to manage resources.
Always plan for service degradation and look for ways to mitigate against issues like this.
Why is it when an article is written talking about the downfall of Silicon Valley, or talking about other great tech oriented cities, that Chicago is hardly ever mentioned. Chicago is the third largest city in the country with a booming tech culture here.
I don't mean to sound flippant but is there any city of greater than, let's say, 100,000 people that's located in the United States that people would not say has "a booming tech culture?" Numerous posts on HN talk up, in alphabetical order: Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit (yes, really), Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Nashville, Orlando, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, Seattle, and I'm sure I missed a few.
Simply put, I'd like to know the inverse, if nothing but sheer inquisitiveness: Let's say you either hate technology startups and want nothing to do with them, or you love them and want to make the biggest career mistake ever. What city do you choose?
Garret are there any plans to offer a self-hosted HipChat solution similar to how Jira and Confluence have self-hosted pricing?
My company is limited to our chat products due to HIPAA compliance and we would love to use this product for company chat but host it on our own infrastructure.
Seconded. We can't use public services for internal messaging, but we do have JIRA + Stash inside the firewall. Hipchat server would be good, or is it XMPP compatible?
It's definitely XMPP compatible. We have an outside dev firm that does some work for us and they connected their own chat system via XMPP. It works fine for them as far as I can tell. Their help docs [1] [2] have all the details you need.
