Brief thoughts on virtualizing a bag-of-boxes hardware startup

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First: Big news! After two years of working as a project software lead
at [my current employer](https://www.teleste.com/), I am switching roles
to senior DevOps engineer. This is less surprising of a shift than it
appears at first when you remember that I have spent most of my life in
DevOps-flavored positions prior to this career. This was a change that
I personally requested, after I felt I had gathered enough
domain-specific and company-specific knowledge to *really* make an
impact there.

My company, among other things, builds software for trains. We sell the fancy displays up that tell you what your next stop is, and we sell the emergency phones and telecommunications you see in every car as well too. We actually read those innumerable EN and IEEE software project standards, and endeavor to follow them to a tee, because that is what our customers expect. We do it all in house, from hardware design to application software. And that’s cool, because it means we are kind of the Apple of this very unusual, very bespoke space.

You don’t need to know anything about the details of e.g. how long the battery for a real time clock will last in a railway warehouse to follow this, though. At its heart we are selling a bag of boxes, mostly Linux boxes, mostly locally networked, and - critically - mostly offline.

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