This post is somewhat of a continuation of a post I made here a little over three years ago: What It’s Like to be a Data Center Technician. My career at SoftLayer has been a great journey. We have gone from four thousand customers at the time of my last post to over twenty five thousand, and it’s funny to look back at my previous post where I mentioned how SoftLayer Data Center Technicians can perform the job of three different departments in any given ticket … Well I managed to find another department where I have to include all of the previous jobs plus one!

Recently I took on a new position on the Development Support team. My job is to make sure our customers’ and employees’ interaction with development is a good one. As my previous post stated, working at SoftLayer in general can be pretty crazy, and the development team is no exception. We work on and release code frequently to keep up with our customers’ and employees’ demands, and that is where my team comes in.

We schedule and coordinate all of our portal code updates and perform front-line support for any development issues that can be addressed without the necessity for code changes. Our team will jump on and fix everything from the layout of your portal to why your bandwidth graphs aren’t showing.

Our largest project as of late is completely new portal (https://beta.softlayer.com/) for our customers. It is the culmination of everything our customers have requested in their management interface, and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten in our forums, tickets and when we’ve met customers in person. If you haven’t taken the portal beta for a spin yet, take a few minutes to check it out!

The transition from exclusively providing customer support to supporting both customers and employees has been phenomenal. I’ve been able to address a lot of the issues I came across when I was a CSA, and the results have been everything I have expected and more. SoftLayer is a well-oiled machine now, and with our global expansion, solid procedures and execution is absolutely necessary. Our customers expect flawless performance, and we strive to deliver it on a daily basis.

One of the old funny tag lines we used was, “Do it faster, Do it better, Do it in Private,” and with our latest developments, we’d be remiss if we didn’t add, “Do it Worldwide,” in there somewhere. If there’s anything I can do to help make your customer experience better from a dev standpoint, please let me know!

-Romeo