As a proud VPS survivor, I thought it might be fun to write up five common options for hosting a web business, ranked in decreasing order of "cloudiness."

Continue reading

Darth Vader took two giant strides toward the immense visiscreen that occupied the forward wall of the bridge of his flagship Imperial star destroyer. "We've got them now," he rumbled. Whirling on the technicians cowering at their consoles, Vader snapped, "Tractor beam!"

"Yes, Lord Vader," replied one, bending attentively to …

Continue reading

Years ago, my company took took over managing a data center in Taiwan when their network admin left. My first thought was, “I am going to need a machete to get the cables under control.”

They had a bunch of satellite dishes on the roof of a building and were …

Continue reading

The five stages of regular exercising:

1. Exercise == pain
2. Actually this doesn't hurt
3. This feels good
4. Feel bad when you miss your daily exercise
5. Exercise when you shouldn't

Examples of #5 are going for a run when it's too hot or when the air pollution is bad. Or in my case …

Continue reading

Here are the slides for the presentation on performance tuning Elixir I gave to the Elixir user's group.

Continue reading

This story about a developer interacting with an entrepreneur has been making the rounds. I have seen this play out multiple times myself.

As a developer, I have a basic rule: it is the responsibility of the "business" guy (or gal) to raise the money. If they can't do it …

Continue reading

One definition of a startup is "a company in search of a repeatable business model." If we have a clear idea of what the customer needs, what they are willing to buy, and have built the product that satisfies them, then we are no longer a startup, we are an …

Continue reading

There is a joke, "The Four Stages of Santa Claus":

1. You believe in Santa Claus
2. You do not believe in Santa Claus
3. You are Santa Claus
4. You look like Santa Claus

There is an equivalent for software developers when it comes to requirements documents and specs.

1. In the beginning of …

Continue reading

Here are the slides for the presentation on Elixir and embedded programming I gave to the Elixir user's group.

Continue reading

After a fair amount of debugging, I got an app running in an AWS Auto Scaling Group (ASG), pulling it's config on startup from S3 and code from Amazon CodeDeploy. On the way I found out some annoying parts of the cloud initialization process in AWS.

The idea is that …

Continue reading