Not very long ago, I was inspired by Nick Silkey to purchase a vanity domain - Clown Shoes is one of my favorite phrases, and to see it turned to such fantastic use made me laugh for quite some time. I had recently changed jobs, and found that as I and my colleagues teased out details of the infrastructure and organization, that each time we turned over a rock, we found new creepy crawly neglected things we had to take care of very quickly. In jest, I typed tirefi.re into our team Slack channel to describe the situation, and when I realized that it hadn’t yet been purchased, I snatched it up. It took me some minutes to toss up an animated gif of a tire fire on Amazon S3, but once I saw it I felt a sense of joy bubble up. I’ve worked in a couple of fields where having a dark sense of humor has helped cope with the struggles faced in the job. Web operations is certainly one of those, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I love my work - the technical side and the people side, the improvement projects and the knocking down tickets. I have had the luck to work alongside some very smart people, doing some pretty neat things, and with some amazing human beings. One thing I’ve learned is that sometimes, when things are dark, a bit of a chuckle can help to lighten the moment, and foster a shared bond between people who’ve been to the dark places and still have the guts to struggle through to the other side together. That is my intention for tirefi.re and the other things I make like it - dark jokes to bring people together in times of trouble.

I hope that y’all use these thingums in that spirit. http://happy.devops.christmas

-Shaun