Every June 8, we mark STH’s birthday. This birthday is a big one as it marks 15 years of STH. I like to discuss big topics on these birthdays and also look back on the year. Both of those topics are very different.
STH Year 15 Huge Changes
When I penned the STH Turns 14 piece, I was living engaged in Austin, Texas. In the last 12 months, the year started with getting married. Which was a pretty big life change.
Since we were living in two different places, we ended up deciding to move to Scottsdale, meaning we did a big move.
An advantage is that STH moved to a new and much larger studio. We have two video sets now, and a photography set in here. We have dedicated shipping and receiving areas, warehouse space, and a big space to set up systems. There are also a few offices, but STH behind the scenes grew by a huge amount.
That transition was a big deal for a few reasons. First, STH’s production capability was shut down for about eight weeks in Q3/Q4 last year, and it took until late Q4 to get everything going. Now, we just have a lot more space. That transition was also made possible by Bryan #2 who did a ton of work in Austin before going back to school.
Then the other shoe dropped. We found out that we were expecting. The baby was due on June 10. While I had been somewhat hoping for a June 8 birthday, the little guy had other ideas. He wanted to be a May baby.
That threw the last few weeks into chaos. In late April, we started working on a massive project plan to complete all of the content for May, June, and most of July simultaneously. That included the massive Intel Xeon 6 Sierra Forest launch. Typically, a major CPU launch piece takes two weeks. Our system(s) arrived within a handful of days of the embargo. It turns out it is much harder to get that done when I am not sleeping as much due to the baby. I just want to say thank you to John for doing a lot of the benchmarking and Alex for editing the video on a quick turnaround. Our team planned the entire summer around me being out from June 4 to July 4 and planned vacations accordingly. Oops.
Even with disruption over the past year on par with the pandemic year, STH still managed to grow. That is really a testament to the great team behind STH. Somehow, we lost more than three months of production time, and yet we still published new content every day. Sure, sometimes that content came out after 11PM, but it somehow happened due to sheer stubbornness and the team putting content out. A big thank you to Will for keeping the streak alive even when the day started with “Patrick my water broke.”
Our Computex coverage is slightly behind this week. We had a team in Taipei while I stayed behind this year. Stay tuned for that.
Final Words
I will discuss some more current behind-the-scenes in the Q2 2024 Letter from the Editor. As a heads-up, if you are in the Phoenix/ Scottsdale area or know someone at ASU who wants to work on STH even for the summer, we will be hiring. The transition to Arizona shifted some expansion plans, and it is time to grow the local team again.
In the meantime, thank you again to the entire STH team and all of the folks who come here to see cool hardware every day. That is the reason STH has made it to a decade and a half.
Congrats Patrick! The site has been of great help.
As an aside, can you please take some time to review & approve new forum acct registrations? I had my account(s) pending approval for weeks. Switched emails and all needed manual approval. I would like to join the discussion and seek help from home net gurus as I am in the process of upgrading. Really appreciate it!
Congrats to the entire STH team!
Thank you for all the amazing content over the years, and here is to many more!
Congratulations, Patrick!
Congratz team! And to Patrick for doing it all at the same time.
Happy 15th. to STH! Congratulations on many jobs well done and here’s to another 15 more years of success at Serve the Home! :-)
as a long time STH reader from Italy, congrats to you, your new family and all the team!
But I am curious: why Scottsdale instead of Austin or California?