Starting Something New
Today marks the start of something new. Well, new to me. I've had a desire to build something to serve others for a long time. But its been pretty hard to decide what I wanted to build. Today I decided to stop waiting for the right answer, and instead to just build something I know I can do.
So I present to you, BlueDogs' Servers. Specifically, video game servers.
Why Video Game Servers?
Great question me! I decided to pursue this due to my professional experience. I've worked as a Linux System Engineer / SRE for about 10 years now. Most of that time was spent in providing a web hosting platform called Cloud Sites. I started that career in Rackspace, which exposed me to TONS of experiences. It also let me see just how wide the technical world was. And probably most impactfully, it taught me how to look at scale of systems as I build out solutions.
In about 2016 or so, Cloud Sites was purchased by a company named Liquid Web. They purchased me as well. While not much changed to the Cloud Sites product, I got exposure to a lot more systems. I'll try to watch my negativity, but ultimately I was taught how to do a lot more with less.
These days I don't work in web hosting. But I'm still pretty involved in providing large space PaaS and/or SaaS. And Scale is everything. Well... it is after you have a working product. :P
Video game servers fit the world of scale for me very nicely. Each server generally only holds a limited number of people, lets say 12 total for a 6v6. Running a server for 12 people is easy. Running 15 servers for a total of 180 slots, it gets a bit trickier. Its cake when everything is working, but imagine needing to update 15 servers. Fix 15 bugs. Validate 15 configs are correct. It can be painful if you don't have tooling. And since I'm already running 4 game servers for my local friend group. I figured I better start building out for that scale!
Oh, I also just like to play video games.
What Should We Expect?
To be honest. I don't know.
I'm not building this out in some optimal way to make money. I'm not trying to create a top of the line solution day 1. I'm really just looking to spend my time on a hobby that interests me. And start exploring what it takes to be a true entrepreneur.
But, if you want to follow along and learn what I'm making and how I'm doing it. Please subscribe and I'll keep you in the loop!
What Have You Done So Far
Big stuff for a day. Small stuff for the long term. But that's what its going to take, a bunch of small steps that build up over time!
So far, I've accomplished the following:
- Bought a domain ( bluedogs-servers.com )
- Also accidentally bought bluedog-servers.com and bluedogs-server.com
- Setup minikube on wsl2 for local development
- Setup ghost on my existing DO Droplet
- Configured some ghost settings
- Wrote this blog post
- Signed up for free trial of mailgun and stripe
- Spent time thinking about what I want to do tomorrow
But with this post, I think I'm going to wrap it up for the day. I'm excited to work on this a bit in the future. Thanks!