Video of Chris and I closing down DA's colo

TLDR; The entirety of DA was physically moved from one place to another over the past 3 weeks. WHA??! Insanity. Here's a video of us shutting down the old colocation facility and feeling pretty good about it.

LONG VERSION; On August 26, 2015, Chris Bolt (chris)  and I went to downtown LA where DeviantArt was hosted to dismantle the last of the colocation facility we inhabited for 13 years. DeviantArt has completed its transition to AWS after a long, long process that has taken chris and his team probably the better part of this year to complete. THANKS PAUL! banks, and JESSICA! petralfire - It's amazing to me how insanely complicated such a transition is, and how little the site was affected by it. We did have a glitch or two, here or there, especially the past 3 weeks, so if you experienced such a thing it was due to this wide scale transition. But on the whole? So smooth. 

This is of course due to the brilliance of my brother from another mother, chris Bolt, Co-Founder of DA, our Chief Architect, and the name sake of The Bolt Award (highest honor given to a team member at DA!). He's perhaps the most important single piece in the proverbial puzzle. Truly the backbone of DA. And so quiet about it, too. You've probably never seen a video of him, this might be the first time. Every single person on Team DeviantArt feels the same about chris Bolt, he's the most lovable person there is. Perhaps on Earth, even. He's just that amazing. 

In the spirit of how things got started, we decided to dismantle the colocation facility together (yesterday) like the old days when we were first building DeviantArt and he and I worked tirelessly on this part of DA for many, many long days and nights. This video probably illustrates the bittersweet vibe about it. I went to the conference room there yesterday and drew my last giant smiley face on the whiteboard, it was a ritual I'd always perform as a way of coping. Ironically the whiteboard markers were pretty much spent! Fitting. I could tell you war stories about this place all day, but I don't want to depress anyone. Ask anyone I've told war stories about this to and they'll tell ya, you don't wanna hear it. LOL 

Here are some photos from wayyyyy back dealing with this ghastly place:




And a couple from yesterday with Chris:



Anyway, DeviantArt is now fully transitioned to AWS and ... we have no regrets about it. Check out the video for one more day in the history books!

-- A