Chris Lea

Chris Lea works for Media Temple. He does the systems engineering work for Virb.com and conducts research into emerging technologies the the hosting provider may want to pursue. You’ll find him on the conference circuit having recently spoken at FOWA London. In this weeks episode Chris takes me through his career, how Media Temple has grown and his plans for the future.

Interview Transcript

Ryan: So what is your job title?

Chris: I don’t have one actually. I haven’t had one for a bit, but if I did it would be something along the lines of Performance Engineer or Research and Development Engineer or something like that.

Ryan: Ok, so tell me a little bit; you work for Media Temple. So tell me a little bit about what you are doing day to day.

Chris: So what I’ve been doing… there are sort of a couple of disparate tracks that I’m doing with Media Temple. The easiest one is that I do the systems engineering work for Virb.com, which is a social network that Media Temple acquired in 2008. So, that’s making sure those systems are operational and are doing what the developers need the systems to do and secure and that sort of thing… that’s under my umbrella. I do some business development work just because some of the things that I’m researching tend to be emerging technologies and that puts me in touch with companies that are using those things and if we’re going to do work with different companies, different projects or whatever, I’m usually involved in those things. Then like I said, a lot of it is seeing what’s happening in the software landscape, sort of server wise and seeing what people are doing on the bleeding edge of things, because the bleeding edge things now are not going to be bleeding edge in six months and more traditional hosting customers may want to be involved in some of those technologies, so I check them out and see what they are used for, and how/if in what way we can leverage them at Media Temple for our customer base.

Ryan: I saw you talk recently at Future of Web Apps, so are you on the conference circuit quite a bit, are you talking quite a bit about this stuff?

Chris: It kinda comes in waves. Talking at FOWA is great, Ryan and his crew put on such an awesome conference, so I’ll probably try and do a little more next year. This year I spoke at South by South West, FOWA and maybe one or two more, I’ll try and do some more speaking next year, I’m not sure. But yeah, I’m out there on the conference circuit. I was just at An Event Apart out in San Francisco to say hi to those guys and its a good way to keep in touch with the community.

Ryan: Ok, right cool. So, that’s a little bit about what you are doing now. Rewind, go right back to the beginning. What was your first job?

Chris: First job post school? or first job like ever!

Ryan: Whichever is most interesting!

Chris: It would be post school actually. I moved out to Los Angeles in the last 90’s and at the time I was just planning on taking a year off and then going back to graduate school, but the Internet was just really, that what was really taking off. You know I studied Physics at school so you sort of picked up the computer skills there and a friend of mine started a little web design company. Actually I ended up working at Fox for a year and a half, working on digital television stuff. This is back when HD only existed in prototype form, so I did that for a year and a half also with the web development stuff. Then the web stuff got too much so I left Fox and did just web stuff for a couple of years. Then we shut that company down and I did freelance software for a while and worked on a couple of books, programming books, PHP books. From there it was Media Temple and I’ve been at Media Temple for six and a half years now.

Ryan: Ok, cool. How big is Media Temple? How many of you are their there?

Chris: It’s big. It’s 180 something people now which is crazy to me as I was employee 18 so its certainly grown a lot. You know you go to the office now and its really really full. That said we’re still hiring as quickly as we can for talented people.

Ryan: So was it quite small when you started?

Chris: Yeah, like I said my employee number was under 20, and a fair number of those people aren’t still there. There’s not a whole lot of people who have been around as long as me, there’s a couple but not too many.

Ryan: What’s your greatest achievement in your career? What are you most proud of?

Chris: Hmm, that’s a good question. I’ve done a couple of things at Media Temple that I’m pretty proud of. I mean most of them were internal projects that aren’t that sexy to talk about but, like, I was one of the guys that got our data centre moved. It was like this god awful project, but you know it had to be done and it actually happened, all things considered, really really smoothly. You know when you’re trying to move that many servers there’s a lot of room for error. We actually managed to get that done over a couple of weekends and few summers ago and that worked. I was sort of in charge of the technical groups at Media Temple during a pretty intense phase of the growth, and you know I managed to keep things going. It was pretty hairy at times, but I think when I took over that job role we were hosting close to 17,000 domains, give or take, and when I stopped doing that role we were hosting like 130,000 domains…

Ryan: Bloody hell.

Chris: Yeah, so percentage wise that was a really big crook in the hockey stick on the graph you know. So really I’m proud of that. I certainly could have done things better than I did looking back on it, but you know we got through. Then, outside of that, I think I’m really proud of some of the biz dev stuff I’ve done at Media Temple. You know when I started it was a company that very much catered towards graphic designers, and we still do certainly, but when I came in I was coming in very much out of being a PHP programmer, a Perl programmer and stuff. I think I helped push the company into supporting the web standards guys, the List Apart kind of crew that we’re friendly with now and that we work with. Things like getting the guys from the Django project and JQuery, sort of more developer centric guys, sort of in the family, I had a hand in there. They are friends of mine, they’re doing fantastic work so obviously I’m proud of those efforts.

Ryan: How did you go about getting those people on board to use Media Temple? What approach did you take?

Chris: Being really blunt. I would stalk them sometimes, but yeah, you know you run into these guys at conferences and I’d be like “Hi we’re Media Temple, we think you’re doing really great work. We’d like to help out with the hosting for people we think are doing great work, what can we do?” You start that dialogue… I think with some of the technical guys because I come from a more technical background we were able to speak the same language pretty well. But like with the jQuery stuff I email John Resig a couple of times and hadn’t heard back as I’m sure his inbox is crazy, and I finally found his cell phone number somewhere are just cold called him, said “Hi, why don’t you let us host the JQuery stuff, we think it’s awesome”. That worked too. So yeah, it’s going straight in I’ve found works best.

Ryan: Cool, ok on the flip side of your greatest achievements, what would you say is your biggest regret career wise?

Chris: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. I mean if I could change one big thing that I did I probably would have worked less in school. I really busted my ass in school, which I mean was good, but I really thought I was going to go into Physics and as I said I was going to take a year off and then come back and I think I missed out on a lot of college because of that. But other that that, biggest regrets… I don’t really have too many. There were a couple of start ups that had I gone with them back in the day I probably would have ended up doing pretty well, sort of when I was doing that freelance stuff people hit me up once in a while, but I don’t really regret it, I mean you never know and they seem pretty crazy at the time, so it’s ok.

Ryan: You briefly mentioned then you wish you’d not worked so hard in school. How do you feel about college or university education when it comes to coming into this industry? Do you think its not necessarily needed? Better to teach yourself on the job?

Chris: I don’t think it is necessarily needed, I do think you need to go through a process of learning how things work in the industry. I studied Physics in a very mathematical piece of the physics universe really hard in school, and I don’t use any of that now, but it certainly taught me a way of approaching problems in a very general sense and very applicable to technical problems. You know coding, dealing with servers, systems, sort of an ability to look at something that is big and complicated and break it down into smaller and smaller pieces until they are small and you can make sense of them and you just deal with them. I definitely got that out of what I learned at college, or I guess university if I were British. But, I don’t think it is necessary you know, the people I know who are really good have all gone through that process one way or the other and sometimes it was self motivated and sometimes it was school and sometimes it was training of some sort. A lot of the guys that I work with don’t have degrees and they are as, or in many cases better than I am at this stuff. I certainly don’t think that on the technical side it is a requirement anymore. I think that the availability of technology has really changed that. When I was doing it I think it maybe was more required more, I don’t know how I would have done it otherwise, but I mean you know Linux is free and easy for everyone to use. Back then if you wanted to get a C compiler you went to your lab because you didn’t really have one you could use or get for free on your computer at home, but now you do. The availability of the technologies that we’re all using for free I think makes that a lot more possible than it was 15 years ago or so.

Ryan: So I suppose really just to wrap up then, where do you see yourself in the future?

Chris: Well, Media Temple is going real strong so I don’t have any plans to depart any time soon. I think that I’m probably going to move, you know… I expect I’m going to go more or less technical than what I’m currently doing. Meaning I will probably get into, just in terms of really trying to focus, I’ll probably need to really hone down on some of these more complex technologies which is going to require doing less biz dev stuff and less publicly viewable stuff and really geeking out, or maybe the other way and I may really sit back and let guys who are probably younger and sharper and more on the ball than me start working on those things and do more of a developmental sort of a role going forward. Media Temple is the kind of company that… we try and hire really talented people and then we try and let them do where their talents take them. So it’s not, like I said I don’t have a title, and that’s fine, that’s cool. We are going to see what kind of problems come up and if I can be of help I’m going to do them and that not always something we can really plan for, but its taken me in some really cool directions so its not something I’m nervous about, its worked out pretty well so far.

Ryan: Ok, fantastic. Well thank you very much Chris for taking the time to talk to me, that’s great. I’m sure people will enjoy that and nice speaking to you.

Chris: Yeah great to speak to you too, thanks.

Much thanks goes to Dan Millar (@danmillar) for transcribing this interview.

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