Kevin Railsback / RSS growing pains redux. I'm pleased to announce that Kevin Railsback, our IT manager here at InfoWorld, has joined the growing ranks of InfoWorld bloggers (along with Paul Venezia
a few weeks ago). I really can't say enough about the breadth and depth
of expertise Kevin brings to InfoWorld — I don't think I have ever
worked with someone who has such deep knowledge about very nearly
everything. While this is Kevin's weblog debut at InfoWorld, Kevin
isn't new to writing by any means. Before I “temporarily” drafted him
into IT operations in early 2001 (sorry, Kevin), Kevin was an InfoWorld
Test Center analyst, west coast technical director, and acting director
of the Test Center, writing lots and lots of reviews and analysis along the way. Aside from InfoWorld, Kevin has also written for Linux Magazine.
Since moving back into IT operations, Kevin has led our migration from
a mixed Solaris/NT environment to Linux, rearchitected our LAN and WAN
environments in many different ways, pushed our Mac environment into OS
X territory (largely converting me in the process), and consolidated
our web infrastructure into one-quarter of the physical space it once
occupied (while making it all perform better than ever). Those are just
the few things I can think of off the top of my head. Kevin is our
go-to guy here at InfoWorld and I'm excited that he'll be sharing his
expertise more regularly.
Kevin hasn't wasted any time contributing useful posts. As I was heading into vacation, Kevin jumped on the feedback I received on my “RSS Growing Pains” column and quickly implemented the key recommendations made by the blog world (which I recapped in followup column
for InfoWorld — wanted to make sure that the word got out in print and
online). Right now, it looks like those changes have made our servers
start yawning again and our growing pains are no more.
That's what I love about my job at InfoWorld — I get to write about
technology issues while having my hands deep in real day-to-day
problems. Then, when I write about a problem, people send me thoughtful
solutions and I get to work with people like Kevin to implement those
solutions in a real-world environment. Living with the technology
solutions we write about certainly keeps us honest, and it's a lot of
fun. [Chad Dickerson]