I have taken upon a new challenge at REA group as a line manager for two site performance engineers and it has caused me to reflect on my time at REA.

Prior to joining REA (known for realestate.com.au - Australians 2nd highest traffic website), I worked for  Rackspace as a Level 3 support engineer whilst on a working holiday in London. I took it upon myself to up-skill on MySQL as most customer calls were related to site performance of a LAMP configuration and almost always the problems were MySQL database related. Poor indexing, poor data structures poor everything!

Taking the web hosting experience and particularly the MySQL experience to REA was a great fit as there were many faults with the architecture design and configuration. Then along Marcus Barczak and others and the leadership of James Wilson we executed an operational uplift of infrastructure operations to build a really rockin' foundation to …