Yep, agreed! Thanks for sharing that, nice point. Most of the work we do as developers isn't the sort of John Carmack's Magic Numbers sort of wizardry, so looking for more of the same sort of dev skill can be counterproductive as you've found.
Nice people are where it's at. After all, we've gotta work together, and someone will always be able to learn the tech...
We're looking for an ops and python automation engineer to help us work on scaling, reliability and automating ops tasks. We work with linux, python, riak, redis, serf, puppet, git and IRC.
We're a small team of 7 that is growing quickly and funded entirely by real customers who like us because we solve a real problem.
Seconding this, switched to TextSecure when they combined SMS and Hangouts. It is an excellent SMS app replacement. The crypto doesn't get in your way, even when almost none of your contacts also use it.
If you're installing it on a laptop just to play with it, perhaps https://www.hostedgraphite.com might be useful. The 14 day trial means you can fool around and dump it for self-hosted at the end of it. :)
(For those who don't know what Graphite is, it's a popular open source tool for recording and graphing metrics, typically server and app performance stuff)
Hetzner is good, the hardware is (mostly) good, the provisioning is fast, the support responses are fast but they follow scripts very closely. The biggest problem is that their network is terrible. We typically lose contact (50% packet loss, 100ms latency) with a machine for 5-10 minutes every day. Different (groups of) machines, different times of the day and night. Every time, Hetzner claim it was an "attack".
I haven't measured it, but they're probably within the 99% availability (allows for 1.68 hours/week downtime) they advertise for any one machine.
(tweet text reproduced here: "I asked Hetzner if they plan to support 2 factor auth & was told that they already do - they require a username and a password. Seriously.")
Nice people are where it's at. After all, we've gotta work together, and someone will always be able to learn the tech...