System Administrator Appreciation Day, or SysAdmin Day, is celebrated on the last Friday in July and recognizes all the IT professionals who keep our organizations up and running around the clock. SysAdmin Day was created in 2000 by Ted Kekatos, a system administrator, and has been celebrated around the globe since. This year SysAdmin Day falls on Friday, July 26, 2024.
SysAdmins are the everyday IT heroes who keep our hardware and software running smoothly, manage our organizations’ IT environments, and keep our networks and systems secure. They are critical to supporting all your organizations’ IT operations in various areas, including:
Backing up data is an important part of a SysAdmin’s role in safeguarding organizations and businesses. Backups help protect data against human error, hardware failure, ransomware, and natural disasters.
Comet Backup is an all-in-one backup solution built for IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) to help protect businesses and prepare them with a disaster recovery and business continuity plan. Comet Backup is highly configurable, supports a broad range of backup types, and has flexible storage options.
Here are some tips and best practices for SysAdmins using Comet Backup:
1. Configure and check user permissions – user profiles are used in Comet’s encryption and key management, and therefore, act as a security boundary.
2. Enable MFA (multi-factor authentication) for admins and end users – secure backups and logins with strong passwords and MFA for an additional layer of security.
3. Set a retention policy – to save storage space and ensure required data is kept for compliance and business continuity.
4. Automate backups on a regular schedule– to ensure consistent data protection, improve business continuity, and reduce recovery time.
5. Set up custom email reports – to ensure that unsuccessful jobs and warnings can be investigated and addressed as soon as possible.
While SysAdmin Day is a great reminder to express thanks to your organizations’ system administrators that keep everything running 24/7, we think they should be celebrated every day as our IT heroes.
We sat down for a chat with Josh Flores, our General Manager who has been with the company since before the launch of Comet Backup in 2017. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
What is your role and how long have you been at Comet?
I’m the General Manager and I’ve been at the company for about 10 years, before Comet became Comet. I have done pretty much every job here at Comet, apart from coding.
Tell us about when you first started working with this leadership team.
I first joined the company when it was Nexus Data Backup, a large backup provider for medical centers, law firms, and other businesses across New Zealand.
A few years later, we sold that backup MSP side of the business. During this time, we had developed our own internal tool, called MyClient, for monitoring all the backup solutions we were using.
Then after a number of years, we launched Comet Backup based on our experience running those earlier businesses.
How did the team decide to develop Comet as a backup solution?
Running MyClient was interesting because we were the integration tool for all of these other backup products. We interacted with the MSPs that were using our tool to manage their backup solutions and we heard a lot from the MSPs about the tools they liked and didn’t like.
We also heard from the MSPs about what they wanted in backup software, but they couldn’t necessarily find. We were getting to the point that the MSPs were asking us to custom build features in MyClient to cover the gap in that functionality that they wanted in their backup software.
Since we were already doing some backup development, we explored the idea of building our own backup solution. That's when we went through the process of R&D. After beta testing and development, we launched Comet in February 2017.
Every day there’s something new. There’s always new types of customers, new advancement in the technology. Since the early days, our team has grown dramatically. We now have a customer base spanning 120 countries, and vendor relationships around the world. Every quarter, we’re expanding in really exciting ways.
How would you describe the team culture at Comet?
It’s amazing. We have a very dedicated team that are really interested in the company, in our customers, and what they're doing. And that passion is contagious.
We also have a very diverse and international team, people from different industries and different cultures. All of that adds to the amazing team culture Comet. Work is always fun when you enjoy the people you work with.
How have you maintained the team culture as the company has grown?
We're selective in our hiring process to prioritize ensuring people will be a great cultural fit. Occasionally, we’ve interviewed candidates who have an outstanding technical skillset, but they would have altered the team dynamic and we’ve passed on those opportunities.
I’d rather hire someone who’s hard working, eager to learn and has a positive attitude and train them up a bit. It’s incredibly important to me to nurture and protect the team environment we’ve built.
How does Comet support the culture of both the remote and office based teams?
Comet has a hybrid working model with a few days in the office and a few days where team members can work from home. We also have some team members who are fully remote.
We try and do absolutely everything we can do to ensure that if you're remote, you still feel like one of the team. On Slack we have our weekly virtual coffee catchups. We really encourage people to talk, not just about work all day, but also to connect on a personal level because that makes spending time together so much more meaningful.
We have different Slack channels like the pets channel, food channel, games channel. People often share photos of their holidays. Stuff like that. It keeps things fun.
We also have CometCon twice a year where we get everyone together for a week for our internal company conference to connect and hang out in person.
CometCon is an opportunity for us come together to collaborate and connect in person. Teams that don’t work as closely on a daily basis will lead sessions where the whole company gathers to brainstorm and learn from one another.
A recent example of this is our marketing department did workshop on our website. And developers who normally wouldn’t give input on that area of the business had a say in the process.
Everyone is encouraged to share their opinions, to critique how we do things, to offer up new ideas. Anyone, at any level, can propose and give one of the scheduled talks on a topic they think would be useful to the company.
It's also a chance to have some fun together. The social events and the food is always a highlight during the week, especially the taco truck. We spend a lot of time focusing on building the product, but it’s also really important for us to have balance and have fun.
What are some of your interests and hobbies outside of work?
In my free time I really like to chill out – I’m into movies, I do a lot of reading, going to the pub, walking the dogs. I'm also really into cooking and trying new stuff, like barbecuing.
"What's New?" is a series of blog posts covering recent changes to Comet in more detail. This article covers the latest changes in Comet Voyager over June 2024.
There were three Comet releases during June - two in the Voyager release series, plus one update for our Mimas release series.
Enforcing Storage Vault Quotas is an important feature of Comet, providing our Managed Service Providers (MSPs) with the ability to restrict how much data a customer is allowed to back up. This feature offers flexibility to accommodate a wide range of business cases and ensures that resources are used efficiently.
In Comet version 24.6.1 and later, we've made a significant enhancement to how we measure the size of stored data in a Storage Vault. This improvement dramatically reduces the time required to start a back up job.
In our test cases, for a Storage Vault with a few terabytes of data stored it would take 10 or more minutes to measure how much data was stored. In Comet 24.6.1 this now takes a few seconds. This change benefits all our customers by enabling faster job initiation, which in turn means that jobs complete quicker.
This improvement not only enhances the user experience by reducing wait times but also optimizes resource usage, allowing our MSPs to provide even better service to their clients. We're excited about this update and the positive impact it will have on your back up operations.
Software Build Role is a Comet Server feature that is responsible for generating client software installers of Comet. When enabled, it activates the Download Client Software page in the Comet Server web interface.
We have now added the ability to enable or disable the Software Build Role per tenant, providing greater flexibility for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) using Comet. Additionally, we've introduced support to configure whether an admin account can change these settings via policy.
These enhancements offer MSPs more control over their software build configurations, allowing for tailored management and improved service offerings.
Constellation Role is a Comet Server feature that provides insight across multiple Comet Servers and is essential tool for automatically removing unused storage. It works by verifying if data in a storage bucket belongs to an active user account on a Comet Server and removes data with no associated user, which can occur if a user is deleted without deleting their stored data.
In older versions of Comet, Constellation Role required a large amount of RAM to perform this function. However, in Comet 24.6.0, we have significantly reduced the RAM usage for Constellation Role, resulting in substantial speed and resource improvements. This means Constellation can prune larger amounts of data faster, and often more reliably.
This has a real benefit for our customers using Cloud Based storage, as removing unused data when it is no longer required is cost effective in the long run.
To improve the usability of our IP rate limiting controls, we have added the ability to configure them in our Comet Server web interface. Previously this feature was only configureable via directly editing the config file of the Comet Server.
By configuring IP rate limits you can control the maximum bandwidth for IP addresses using regular expressions and set limits in bytes per second. Multiple rules can be defined, creating rate-limiting domains that match incoming requests. Rate limits apply separately to ingress and egress traffic, allowing simultaneous upload and download limits.
IP rate limiting can help maintain consistent performance and fair bandwidth usage across all users, and with our latest Comet release, it is even easier to configure.
If you haven't seen it, check out our recent blog post announcing our Impossible Cloud Integration as well as our joint webinar on Premier Cloud Storage & Backup for Europe’s MSPs on Wednesday, July 17th at 11am CET (Central European Time).
New Charging Model for Hyper-V and VMware Protected Items
You will notice that Hyper-V and VMware Guests will be charged daily per Protected Item from July.
This updated charging model can lead to a reduction in your overall bill. By charging per day per Protected Item, we align costs more closely with actual usage, potentially lowering your expenses.
We're committed to continuously improving our services and look forward to delivering even more enhancements in the future. Thank you for your continued support!
We're proud to announce our partnership with cloud storage provider, Impossible Cloud. As a European-based company, this is a great option for IT Providers with GDPR compliance requirements. All data is securely stored within a European Cloud Provider in top-tier, GDPR-compliant, and ISO-certified data centers, eliminating the need for additional investment in data storage compliance.
Impossible Cloud is Europe’s premier cloud storage solution, designed to provide businesses with secure, scalable, and cost-effective data storage.
Their platform features built-in ransomware protection, unlimited hot storage, and 100% S3 API compatibility. Advanced security measures and significant cost savings makes Impossible Cloud an ideal choice for businesses looking to enhance their data storage capabilities.
Comet’s user-friendly integration with Impossible Cloud allows you to easily select Impossible Cloud as your storage solution.
The integration includes Storage Template support for provisioning direct-to-cloud buckets for individual end-users. This feature can use Impossible Cloud's IAM functionality for end-user support, as well as their partner API for MSPs who are looking to start reselling Impossible Cloud storage.
Another great feature we have with Impossible Cloud is Object Lock integration for creating immutable backups. Object Lock puts the data in an immutable state—it’s accessible and usable, but it can’t be changed or deleted. This provides complete defense against ransomware attacks, giving you peace of mind for data stored in the cloud.
Impossible Cloud IAM Storage Template with Object Lock
Another aspect that makes Impossible Cloud competitive for IT Providers is their price €7.99 per terabyte per month, with no egress or hidden fees. Impossible Cloud’s has a pay-for-what-you-use pricing structure which is designed to be transparent and predictable. This price is competitive with Wasabi, Backblaze and our own Comet Storage offering, with the benefit of allowing you to pay in Euros if you wish.
If you want to learn more about our integration partnership, join us for our joint webinar on Premier Cloud Storage & Backup for Europe’s MSPs on Wednesday, July 17th at 11am CET (Central European Time). If you can’t make it live, you can still register to get the recording sent to you after the webinar.
Last week we held our fourth CometCon event, a company-wide internal conference where both local and remote team members gather at Comet HQ for a week of collaboration, workshops, speaker talks, and connection.
As usual, our General Manager, Josh, kicked off the week with a fun team activity – this time splitting everyone into teams for an interactive quiz. After the winners were presented with their prizes, we launched into the conference sessions.
At each CometCon, every department is welcome to submit a topic for the speaker series. This week we had three technical deep dives from our developers, a website workshop with the Marketing team, customer insights from the Sales team, and a Q&A session focused on our European distributor market. It’s always valuable to learn from different departments and discuss how we can improve the product and experience for our customers.
During CometCon, our developers worked in pairs on a dedicated week-long sprint. It was great to partner the devs up with someone they don’t usually work with to generate fresh ideas and smash out specific projects.
In addition to the speaker series, we also had several open discussions about the product roadmap and our company direction, facilitated by Callum, our Product Engineering Manager, and Josh, our GM. Everyone was welcome to ask questions and contribute to the conversation in a town hall style discussion. It’s important to us to hear different perspectives and thoughts from all the teams on Comet’s journey.
One of the most valuable parts of CometCon is the unstructured time to connect and chat with everyone in person, especially for our fully remote team members. Even for those who work at Comet HQ – our company has a hybrid model where a couple days are remote each week – it is valuable to have everyone together for a full week. We find that the conversations and innovative ideas that get tabled over a shared plate of tacos or a pint at the pub, it something you just can’t replicate over Slack.
This was our best CometCon yet! The energy and buzz of having everyone together was amazing. Huge thanks to the event organizers for another successful CometCon! We can’t wait for the next one.
We're very pleased to announce our latest Quarterly release series - Comet 24.5 Enceladus. This is the the latest entry in our quarterly rollup series, that branches off from our main rolling Voyager development into a fixed target for you to qualify and build your service offering upon.
Enceladus is a moon of Saturn and is named after the giant Enceladus of Greek mythology. There are a few worlds that are thought to have liquid water oceans beneath their frozen shell, but Enceladus sprays its ocean out into space where spacecraft can sample it. From these samples, scientists have determined that Enceladus has most of the chemical ingredients needed for life, and likely has hydrothermal vents releasing hot, mineral-rich water into its ocean. Enceladus is about as wide as Arizona, and it also has the most reflective surface in our solar system. Because it reflects so much sunlight, the surface temperature is extremely cold, about minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 201 degrees Celsius).
For users coming from the previous 24.2 Mimas quarterly release series, Enceladus adds 6 new features and 38 enhancements. Some of the new features we are excited about are:
If you'd prefer to watch rather than read, we're hosting a webinar to discuss this new quarterly release and all the new changes. Please register before we go live on Tuesday 11 June (4pm EDT / 1pm PDT) to catch up on all the latest Comet news with Comet's CTO, Mason - and as usual, there will be time for a live question-and-answer session at the end of the presentation.
As well as that, we have many more videos available on our YouTube channel, including guides on getting started with Comet, individual features, demonstrations with our technology partners, and webinars for previous quarterly software releases.
Microsoft Office 365 Protected Item Performance Improvements
Over this month, we have made significant improvements to the backup performance of our Microsoft Office 365 Protected Item. These performance improvements mean the backup job completes faster, as well as reduces the amount of data we need to upload. We expect partners to see Microsoft Office 365 Protected Items finish up to 30 times faster.
When configuring a Disk Image Protected Item in the Comet Server web interface, it can be difficult to configure when the device is not currently connected to the Comet Server. To help partners configure a Disk Image Protected Item more easily, we have added a new option to select disks to protect by drive letter.
Our Bulk Upgrade feature is a great way to keep Comet Backup desktop app installs up to date with the latest version that the Comet Server is running. However, for Comet Servers with many tenants using custom branding, a Bulk Upgrade campaign to upgrade older clients consumed significant CPU time building new client installers quickly.
In Comet 24.3.8 we added a new configuration option to limit the maximum number of CPU cores Comet can use during a Bulk Upgrade campaign. This is a fantastic improvement as it reduces the burden on system resources during a Comet Server upgrade. It also provides a more robust Bulk Upgrade campaign, as Comet Backup desktop app installs can be upgraded without overwhelming the Comet Server's resources. For more information, you can check out our documentation here.
Windows System Backup Protected Item - Deprecation Notice
Our Windows System Backup Protected Item is being deprecated. Before we added our Disk Image Protected Item, Windows System Backup Protected Item was a great way to backup and restore entire Windows disks. However, it required spool space (temporary storage) to be able to perform this backup. This means for a 500GB disk, Comet requires an additional 500GB of free space for this Protected Item to work.
Because of this limitation, and how difficult it is to setup, we have always recommended partners use our Disk Image Protected Item. To assist partners through this change, we have built a Windows System Backup to Disk Image conversion tool. For more information, you can see our documentation on the tool here.
We will be removing this Protected Item in November (Comet Release 24.11).
We're pleased to announce the Syncro integration with Comet is now available. This has been a popular feature request and we are pleased that partners can now monitor their backups through Syncro's RMM platform.
Syncro - Helps you scale your MSP buisness with efficiency and ease.
Transform how you manage customers and your business with RMM, PSA and remote access in a single platform. The streamlined workflow allows you to focus your time and energy on what you're an expert in – providing solutions for your clients.
With the Syncro integration, you can access RMM alerts in Syncro's platform when a Comet backup job fails or doesn’t run. This allows you to see your alerts in one place, rather than logging into Comet, and troubleshoot before you lose any business critical data.
If you are interested in configuring this integration, you can read our guide here.
When a backup job fails, a new RMM alerts will be created. You can see this on the Open RMM Alerts page in Syncro. An example of how this will look is:
If the failure is due to an intermittent issue, Comet will clear the alert when the backup job succeeds again.
This means you no longer have to login to your Comet Server to check if backup jobs are running successfully or not.
What's New? is a series of blog posts covering recent changes to Comet in more detail. This article covers the latest changes in Comet over April 2024.
There were three Comet releases during April - two in the Voyager release series, plus one update for our Mimas release series.
We've landed a few large and exciting features this April:
Hyper-V CBT is now available in our Voyager series. Hyper-V CBT performs efficient backups of Hyper-V Virtual Machines by only reading blocks of a virtual disk that have changed since the last backup job. This means Comet only needs to upload the data that has changed inside the VM without having to read and upload every byte.
You will find two new Hyper-V Backup Mode types when setting up a Hyper-V Protected Item. These are Latest VM State (Changed Block Tracking) and Latest VM State (Standard). You can read more about what these new modes do in our documentation here
Under the hood our two new Hyper-V Backup Mode types use WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and RCT (Windows Resilient Change Tracking) to perform the backup. This is a completely new way for Comet to backup Hyper-V VMs as our old implementation used Windows VSS (Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service).
New Hyper-V Backup Option One: Changed Block Tracking using WMI and RCT
New Hyper-V Backup Option One: Hyper-V Backup using WMI
We're pleased to announce that Impossible Cloud is now available as a built-in Storage Template in our Voyager series. If you enter top-level credentials into the Storage Template, Comet can use them to provision private buckets with separate credentials for each user, allowing seamless direct-to-cloud backup.
As a quick reminder - when using the Storage Templates, it's likely you'll want to configure cleanup for cloud buckets that are no longer being used by any user account. Comet's solution for this problem is called Constellation Role, and it's available from the settings page of your Comet Server. In Constellation, you can enter the same credentials for it to search through. When a Constellation report runs, it finds all your buckets; checks all the user accounts; cross-references the users' Storage Vaults with the available buckets; and deletes any discovered buckets that are not in use by any user account.
Constellation Role is designed to scale up to clusters of multiple Comet Servers, with any mix of server replication, Storage Role, or direct-to-cloud buckets created by the Storage Template feature. You should have exactly one Constellation Role server amongst your entire cluster of Comet Servers.
Users can now sign into Comet-Hosted servers using their account.cometbackup.com accounts. This feature simplifies access to Comet-Hosted servers, allowing users to utilize their existing Comet Backup account credentials for authentication. To enhance security, users are encouraged to set up two-factor authentication (2FA) on account.cometbackup.com.
This feature has already been enabled, and will be used the next time you click the login button from the My Services page on account.cometbackup.com.
In addition, once you have clicked the login button on the My Services page you will notice the new "Login with Comet Account Portal" button appear on the login screen of your Comet-Hosted server. This button will only appear on browsers where you have clicked the My Services login button before. We have done this to ensure we don't break any rebranding you have configured by showing a big "Login with Comet Account Portal" button.
We are pleased to announce that Comet-Hosted is now available to be hosted in the London region. Comet users now have the choice of four geographically diverse locations to choose from when selecting where their Comet-Hosted server should be located.
Throughout April, we rolled out over twenty fixes and enhancements aimed at improving the overall quality and performance of Comet. These updates underline our commitment to providing a reliable and efficient backup solution for our users.
We announced a change to our Self-Hosted licensing this week, and I’d like to take some time to provide more context. We have received feedback, both positive and negative, with many constructive insights – thank you to those that have been in touch.
Since launching in 2017, Self-Hosted has evolved into our enterprise solution which allows you access to features such as:
Setting up tenant accounts
Multi-server replication
Support for on-prem storage
Access to our full API
Scalable solution for resellers and distributors
Comet-Hosted does not support these features, which is why its price remains $49/server/month. Please check out our product pages for Self-Hosted and Comet-Hosted for a full comparison.
We’re committed to helping MSPs provide great backup services. In order to fulfil that mission and to grow the product, we need to adequately support and resource our development team. As our business grows to meet your needs, our pricing model needed to change.
Increasingly, we’re finding that more end-users are skipping their MSP and are buying Comet directly. We have always supported a Channel-first approach. We stand behind the value that we know MSPs offer their clients. It’s important to us to honor that commitment and drive business to our MSP partners.
With our previous pricing model, we were seeing a disproportionate number of signups choosing Self-Hosted, based solely on price. They spent a lot of time setting it up, and we spent a lot of time helping them configure a product that didn’t necessarily suit their use case. The purpose of this price realignment is to match customers with the product that best fits their needs based on feature set rather than a default price.
We understand that for some of our partners this is a big change. We are here to help you navigate this transition and figure out what is right for your business. Whether you want to stay with Self-Hosted, migrate to Comet-Hosted, or work with one of our trusted resellers or distributors, we are here to help you. Feel free to reach out to us at hello@cometbackup.com to discuss your options.
Thank you,
Josh
Josh Flores
General Manager
Comet Backup
We’ve had some questions, and I’d like to address a few of these here:
Q. Have there been any external influences on this decision?
A. No, we’re a privately owned company. Our only influence has been to reflect the true value of Comet’s Self-Hosted enterprise-level features and benefits as well as the time and effort of our excellent support and onboarding team.
Q. Could you have verified / confirmed MSPs and businesses before they could access Self-Hosted?
A. We have heard it loud and clear that having to book a sales call to access a product isn’t well liked. This is why you can start a free trial with Comet at any time.
Q. Are you wanting to migrate users to Comet-Hosted to then put up the price there?
A. We have no plans to change the price for Comet-Hosted.
Q. Could you have just charged users for support?
A. This has the effect of discouraging people from reaching out to us. We’re here to help, and we want our partners to succeed. Our support remains free.
Q. Are any other areas of Comet’s pricing affected?
A. No, this pricing change only affects Self-Hosted Server licensing.
We sat down for a chat with Callum Sinclair, our Product Engineering Manager who has been with the company since January 2023. This piece has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
I started at Comet as the Development Team Leader, and was promoted into the Product Engineering Manager role earlier this year.
As the Dev Team Leader, I was looking after the entire development department; scoping and managing work for both dev teams, and promoting a culture of quality and growth so that our team is constantly upskilling to better serve our customers’ needs.
Now my role as Product Engineering Manager has grown to also include setting the direction that Comet takes as a product and laying out our product roadmap.
It changes every week depending on what we’ve got going on. That’s what keeps the job exciting.
A lot of it is communicating with internal and external stakeholders about what we're planning to do. One of the most important parts of my role is speaking directly with our customers, distributors and integration partners to hear their needs and figure out how we can address them.
Then I gather all that information into a cohesive vision and work with the development team to scope and action upcoming work.
I was looking to take the next step in my career and Comet provided me the opportunity to go from a senior software engineer into a leadership role, which was the opportunity I was looking for. It's been awesome.
What is your favorite thing about working at Comet?
The freedom and autonomy to have an impact and make changes that elevate the team and the way we do things. There isn’t a culture of, “you must do it this way”.
The opportunity to grow is incredible. Sometimes that involves mistakes or missteps, but I’ve learned a lot, and continue to improve. I think that is reflected in the product we make. We're always pushing ourselves to be better, which results in a product that’s constantly improving.
It’s awesome – everyone supports each other, which is amazing. You can always speak up, ask questions and ask for help. Everyone's here to support each other. One of the strongest things we have at Comet is how well we work with each other.
It’s a very open culture, so you always feel included, you’re never shut out of decisions and you’re always kept in the loop. We encourage everyone to give input, even if it’s not their department or their project. Anyone can voice an opinion or raise an issue. Which makes for a great work environment.
What is the learning and development like at Comet?
You are learning all the time. I don't think there's ever been a day where I haven't been like, "Oh, that's new." Or, "That's something cool."
We're constantly picking up new tech and have the opportunity to work on new things.
That is also reflected in our development work. You're always getting pushed into new areas, you get to work on your code bases, new products, new features. We also push people to do additional training in areas that we think will be of value to them in the future. So there's plenty of chances to grow and to learn.
What keeps you passionate about moving forward in the industry?
I’m passionate about building a high quality backup product that fits the needs of organizations across many different industries. I’m excited that we have the opportunity to be innovative and refine our ideas.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to get into the tech industry?
There’s a lot of ways to get into the industry, and I think it really just starts with being passionate in anything related to tech.
You can go the traditional ways through university or higher education taking courses like computer science or software engineering. That gives you great exposure to the different fields and domains within the tech industry.
Another way is just getting involved and writing your own code. I think it comes down to what you’re passionate about and following what interests you.
My earliest memory of tech is probably playing Age of Empires II on an old school Windows XP, that got me interest in computers in general.
From there I started doing programming courses in high school and in college, which led to being interested in studying computer science. The more I learned, the more interested I got because there is so much to learn and tech is evolving so quickly. There’s so many areas you can get into.
If you could have any tech superpower, what would it be?
The first that came to mind would be the ability to instantly write code in different languages. I know about four coding languages at this point and I'd love to learn more, but don't have the time. Being able to natively pick it up and jump in between code bases would be awesome.
Also, being able to spot code issues would be another one. But then again some of the fun of coding is spending the hours to find the bug, finally understanding it, and then fixing it. So having that superpower might be cheating the process a little bit.
I like biking as my mode of transport, so it’s fantastic that it’s flat in Christchurch. It’s also really convenient to get to most outdoor activities. Christchurch is close to the mountains and also has nice beaches nearby. Being on the South Island, we have easy access to do weekend trips to amazing destinations like Wanaka and Queenstown.
I used to swim competitively, and I still spend some time training in the pool. I’m also a big fan of F1 racing now. Another hobby is trying out new foods, cooking different cuisines, and trying the adventurous options at restaurants.
We know everyone at Comet loves food. What are your top three restaurants in Christchurch?
At the moment, I'm a big fan of the barbecue restaurants. There’s Beers down the road from the office, and an all you can eat Brazilian BBQ place in Papanui. And I like El Quincho, the Argentinian BBQ place at Riverside Market.
