My Beatport title changed from Network Administrator to Director of Information Technology.
I was twenty-two.
I knew servers, networks, Linux, Windows, mail, security, monitoring, and the physical work of building infrastructure.
Beatport was not standing still. Music came in from labels. Files needed processing and storage. Search and databases served the store. Customers needed downloads and support. Internal tools connected the people doing the work.
My first months had been completely hands-on. Mail routes, queues, lists, shared addresses, outside delivery, vacation responders, drives, and whatever broke next. The new title did not remove any of that.
The title changed. The tests did not. I went back to the systems underneath it.
The early Beatport work had been direct: new accounts, mail routes, shared addresses, vacation responders, disks, and whatever needed checking that day. The new signature did not remove any of it.
Music still had to enter the system. The store still had to search, sell, and deliver it. Customers still needed support. A title could name the responsibility, but it could not run the queue.
I changed the signature and kept working.
Beatport was still a young company. DJs bought downloadable tracks through the site, and every one of those files had to make its way through storage and delivery. The storefront depended on the systems behind it staying available.
The old title had been two words. The new one was five. The servers did not care.
The next email still needed to arrive. The next disk still needed space. The next problem would still start with somebody asking me to look at it.