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Tales from the Server Room

Tales from the Server Room

War stories, hard lessons, and honest reflections from 20+ years of building software for MSPs, starting with servers on planes and ending up in the cloud.

Robert Isaacs

Robert Isaacs

Founder & CEO, Nine Minds

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Tales from the Server Room
★ Featured
Origin StoryMay 10, 2026|4 min read

The Day Our Software Update Took Down a City

Before cloud, before remote updates, before anyone called them MSPs — we were carrying servers onto planes and learning about exponential growth the hard way.

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Tales from the Server Room
Origin Story
Apr 22, 2026|5 min read

75 Days

Our release was going to take 75 days to fully transfer to our users. The CTO refused to believe the number. I stood at the window thinking about how nice it must be to not know how doomed everything was.

Tales from the Server Room
Origin Story
Apr 21, 2026|4 min read

We Have No Future, But We Know How to Have Fun

A due diligence trip to Toledo during the financial crisis, staying at the Ritz in Detroit, and a car rental receptionist who summed up a city — and turned out to be wrong.

Tales from the Server Room
Origin Story
Apr 14, 2026|4 min read

I Think HAL Has Become Self-Aware

We named our dev server HAL. Then we discovered our customers had been running on it for months. Then HAL sent me a message.

Tales from the Server Room
Welcome
Apr 7, 2026|2 min read

Welcome to Tales from the Server Room

Over 20 years of building software for MSPs, a lot has happened. Some of it was funny. Some of it was terrifying. Most of it was both at the same time.