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1.2. Arctic's Unsung Heros
Even though we have been stuck in an existential loop regarding the newsletters, we have not been idle. As always your support team here at Arctic has been tirelessly answering your burning questions and saving you from yourselves. (Help! I accidentally deleted this guest and all of their information and their trip leaves in two days! ð)
However, there is an overlooked team that works just as hard and is even more important to the success of your Arctic operations. This team is our Dev Team.
These vigilant tech warriors keep Arctic running safely and smoothly so that you can focus on what you do best, providing truly excellent adventures and experiences for your guests. Without them Arctic would cease to exist.
It's easy to recognize the Dev Team when you are seeing lots of great new features that you can play with and add to your day to day processes but there is so much invisible, behind the scenes stuff (there's that super technical term, again ðĪ) that happens. All of which is wwwaaaayyyyy more important to the successful operation of your Arctic installations than the things you can see on the surface. Without it, the system would come to a grinding, catastrophic halt without even a fun "Game Over" screen. It would just be the end of your Arctic world as you know it. So long. Hasta la vista. Call the mortician, we are totally dead. The end. ððŠĶ
The infrastructure that Arctic runs on behind the scenes is the critical piece that keeps your installation running along smoothly. It's much like the engine of your car. Talking about the infrastructure Arctic uses to run is like trying to talk about all the technologies, fluids, belts, gaskets, nuts and bolts that our cars need to keep running optimally. We know that stuff exists but unless it's our field of interest/expertise words like "starter", "carburetor" and "ecm" don't really mean much and just sound intimidating. ðŽ This is why we have experts to help us navigate all of these technicalities so our cars can keep running.
For your Arctic installations, these experts are the Dev Team. They work tirelessly to ensure that Arctic doesn't suffer any failures or outages. To that end, they keep up with scary and overwhelming things like "End of Life" for server software and hardware, operating system upgrades, source code updates, hardening servers against security vulnerabilities, and so much more.
Over the last couple of years, our Dev team has upgraded not only PHP (the primary code the software runs on) but a myriad of other languages our software utilizes. In addition, they also had to migrate the operating systems of the servers we use to serve up the software; even more delicate, they had to migrate the database servers. The database server upgrade was particularly delicate because a mess up could have cost our users all of the relevant data in their installations. ðą None of these changes were optional. All of them were required to make sure Arctic continued to be current and secure in the midst of the ever-changing landscape of the tech world.
The amazing part is that the Dev Team handled all of these scary, monumental updates and changes without you ever knowing it was happening. They spent countless hours testing and re-testing the new systems before they were ever deployed.
During all of this, the user experience was completely unaffected. You had no idea these things were even happening or did happen until now. An undisturbed user experience is the ultimate goal and the mark of a job exceptionally well done when it comes to these kind of changes.
However that also means, it can look like the Dev Team have just been sitting idle, twiddling their thumbs, takin' a break. When the reality is they just completely rebuilt and retooled the entire engine, transmission, and drive train of the car you drive everyday without costing you one minute of down time. Talk about rockstars. ð§ðĪðĻðĪ Zoom, zoom. ðïļ
So take a moment to give a shout out to the amazing people on your Dev Team who work diligently to ensure that you never skip a beat, never experience an outage and can keep on doing what you do best while they handle the mechanics of it all. They are truly heroic. ðŠ