04.30.2012 By Chris Widner
Dyn Culture: When Change Comes, Will You Be Ready?
This quote brings me back to a conversation I had as we were setting up for a DynTini in Las Vegas a few years ago. I was amazed by the growth and change we had at Dyn up to that point so I asked two of our VPs, “Is it normal for things to change so often?”
“Chris, it’s fine. In fact, it’s good. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
I had no problem with the changes I was seeing, especially considering the opportunities they had provided me. I found it to be thrilling and it satiated my appetite for new experiences and things to try. However, I had some people around me warning me of impending doom. To them, change was a bad thing.
How can two people view the same change in a completely different manner? Only some people realize the opportunity for growth that change provides. In fact, the harder the change, the more opportunity for growth.
When it comes to change, people find themselves in one of four buckets.
Read More04.27.2012 By Jeremy Hitchcock
Why The Traditional Work/Life Balance Is A Lie
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I say something about work/life balance many times a month. It’s said during interviews, company meetings and also as a cautionary tale to people who are stretching themselves too thin.
The secret: it’s all a lie.
Read More04.25.2012 By Kyle York
European Vacation: Inside Dyn’s Booming New EMEA Office
Around this time last year, we opened an office in the UK and strongly committed our global IaaS company to the European market. We hired a seasoned Regional Director in Phil Akilade, began enhanced account management with all UK/EMEA customers, started hiring and established a strong trade show and sponsorship plan throughout the region.
It was reminiscent of when we started building our brand and U.S.-based sales team in 2009: grassroots, assertive and unique. I had high expectations when we expanded out for the first time, but witnessing it come to life has been one of the greater accomplishments of my career.
We still have a way to go, but the foundation is more than laid.
Read More04.24.2012 By Ben Anderson
Web Performance: Why Good User Interface Design Matters
When it comes to software, users don’t really care that something “just works” as that’s expected in what you’re selling. For developers though, “just working” is the most significant step in writing an application and when it’s functioning correctly, it is all too often considered “done” in their eyes.
Functionality is only half the battle. A good UI (user interface) is the other half.
Read More04.23.2012 By Dyn News
Dyn Expands EMEA Presence With New Office, New Hires
Brighton, UK (April 19, 2012) – Dyn (formerly Dynamic Network Services, Inc.), a worldwide leader in Internet Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), has continued its global push by expanding and relocating its EMEA office to Brighton, UK.
The new office, which is located at Aspect House in Queen’s Road, will be Dyn’s operational base as it pursues more enterprise clients in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
It was only last year that the DNS and Email Delivery leaders with corporate headquarters based in Manchester, New Hampshire, USA, opened their first worldwide office in London. But an aggressive growth plan and plenty of new business created the need for a larger space.
Read More04.20.2012 By Mike LoVerme
Check Your DynECT Email Delivery Reports On Your Android
Have you ever received a phone call that required you to stop what you were doing and find a laptop with an Internet connection? When that happens, chances are that it’s at an inconvenient time. Wouldn’t if be nice if you could get the information you need right on your smartphone in seconds? I have been looking into making this a reality and the process has begun.
Enter the DynECT Email Report Viewer.
Read More04.16.2012 By Tom Daly
From Swinging A 48 Hour Hammer To A Bad News First Environment
With each phase of growth and especially over the past three years, shifts in Dyn’s tides occurred due to a variety of factors, many times related to the number of people we’ve hired and other times due to the physical geography of our office.
One of the monumental shifts I’ve noticed recently (and likely took too long to reflect upon and realize) is that it has become harder for our teams to relay onward bad news to each other as soon as it is realized. Examples of this kind of bad news: “the schedule is going to slip” or “the scope needs to be reduced” or “we’re not going to win the deal we thought we would”.
When I started at Dyn in 2001, we had just four employees and we all sat at a bunch of desks in one room with all critical business functions occurring within a 100 foot square area. I was helping with customer support and system administration and occasionally dabbling in software development. CEO Jeremy Hitchcock was watching over the finances, writing some code and also keeping an eye on customers. Others were building software and scaling systems.
Read More04.12.2012 By Kyle York
Kicking IaaS To Start 2012: A Look At Dyn’s First Quarter
The following is an email I sent last week to our entire company that I wanted to share as I’m extremely proud of what we’ve done so far in 2012 and what we’re going to keep doing throughout the rest of the year. You want the inside scoop on why we’re the best IaaS company in the world? The secrets are revealed here!
I just wanted to drop a quick line and thank you all for the hard work you put in to help grow this company so far in 2012. Our Q1 was ridiculously insane in such a positive way that it’s important for us to all take the weekend to reflect.
“Better, Faster, Stronger” couldn’t have been more accurate than what we saw in our Q1 as we stayed true to the year’s plan. It’s time to ratchet it up further in Q2!
The final quarterly numbers aren’t entirely done, but here are a few noteworthy snapshots:
- Our yearly projections for ecommerce revenue went up in just three short months. Huge props to the entire company for making this happen!
- Our enterprise revenue target was smashed for Q1. Another huge props to the entire company! In 90 days, we matched our closed sales output for the past two years. When you think of just how strong we’ve been in our last few years, this is something to be proud of.
Here’s some other facts that I just find outstanding about the last three months:
Read More04.11.2012 By Andrew Sullivan
Resolution, Browsers & Hope For The Future
Last September, my colleague Ben Anderson provided a nice illustration of the ways browser caching behavior can be a problem. This is a general issue that has been around for a number of years. Many browsers have wrestled with it repeatedly and the issue doesn’t seem to go away.
However, there seems to be some new interest in tackling this issue and some interested parties gathered just before the IETF meeting at the end of March to discuss it.
Why do browsers care about the DNS at all?
DNS is not something that most people think about when using the Internet. Neither should they have to: the DNS is just part of the infrastructure in the same way that IP addresses are. This is why Dyn works so hard to make our customers’ DNS infrastructure so reliable as the only time a user ought to notice the DNS is when it breaks (and it should never break).
If that’s true, then we ought to expect any Internet client – including web browsers – to use the very same infrastructure as everything else and for the DNS resolution mechanisms to be the ones offered by the operating system. What makes browsers different?
Read More04.10.2012 By Alex Sergeyev
How Working At Dyn Helps Me Grow As An Engineer
We have the reputation of being more fun than your typical tech company: lots of toys, our Music Meets Tech event, a climbing wall and even a “treehouse” conference room. But these are not essential to what makes Dyn an exciting and happy workplace for us engineers. Our top strength is that we are “learners” as we like to discover new things and want to solve problems.
Dyn gives us a plenty of opportunities to grow and keep improving ourselves:
- We frequent many major tech conferences nationwide and internationally. During our first quarter alone, we had employees at OASIS, Percona Live: DC 2012, Less Conf, Strata and PyCon just to name a few, meeting tech leaders and innovative minds to learn from their ideas.
- We maintain a strong commitment toward contributing to Open Source projects. Everyone has the freedom to commit important bug fixes to open software. It’s a great feeling to know that your little piece of code (or even a summary of the problem you found) can be appreciated by and beneficial to programmers around the world.
- We enjoy our “Unroadmap days” where Dyn engineers have two full days each month to work on anything they like. It gives us freedom to explore and create our own projects while expanding our skills.
- Everyone is encouraged to host internal “Lunch and Learn” events. It is a chance to meet in an open forum setting and step back from our computers to swap information.