Category: Technology

WordPress server switch, part 3 | Still Here

Just a quick post to say that A) I’m still alive and this website is still online (you’re reading this!), and B) just completed another migration of the website. As cool/fun as it was to be hosting it on Auzre PaaS these last few years it was totally overkill / oversized for the need, and also more expensive. So I moved it to a hosting provider with an annual fee of what I was paying every 1- or 2-months. If I was running a business with more visitors, then I’m sure it would pencil out, but not for my personal site. And it was a great way to learn about Azure!

If you’re new here, hope you enjoy browsing the posts, some of which go back over 12 years! And maybe, just maybe, if you’re lucky it won’t be another 6 years before my next blog post 😉

Technology

WordPress server switch, part 2

I had a day off today (Friday). And what did I do? Spent some of it reconfiguring my website — guess I don’t have to turn in my geek card just yet! For some context, see my earlier post about switching the site over to Azure IaaS.

Today I switched from Azure IaaS (think VM) to Platform as a Service or PaaS. And it worked! What that means for me is no more server to worry about, and in fact once the cutover was complete I turned the VM off. Basically what I have now are two services that serve up my website, a web service and a database service (MySQL). No more patching, no more administering a server. Earlier in the day, I spent some time upgrading the version of MySQL Server on my VM (this was before I decided to make the switch.) That’s exactly the kind of thing I *don’t* have to worry about going forward. Woo hoo!

PS I very nearly went solo paddling today on my day off, but the forecast (wind/waves) wasn’t so nice — a bit out of my risk tolerance. And there’s the snow and cold temps, too. Although I got a fleece drysuit liner (think adult onesie) that will definitely help the cold-weather paddling. And truth be told, it’s so comfy I wear around the house sometimes! It’s marvelous.

Browse away…

Technology

WordPress server switch

Hello all, long time since I’ve posted on here it would appear. Lots and lots has transpired since then, which I’m sure I’ll cover at some point, but today’s post is about pizza — or at least a pizza analogy. This is the first post since I switched my server over to an Azure vm (i.e. Infrastructure as a Service or IaaS) from another IaaS provider. Think of it this way, as brilliantly expressed as Pizza as a Service, the different ways to get pizza:
My next step is to switch my WordPress site to Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS), which will be platform-based versus server-based. In that scenario, I’ll just have a web/app platform that hosts my site with a MySQL database platform. The benefits are that it’s less for me to manage and it should also end up costing less each month. This is how I’ve set up my other placeholder website for http://www.kayakbrain.com/, which is a domain I purchased a while back and a venture I hope to develop later. That’s it for today, peace and TTfN!
Technology

Chuck’s Tips on Management (So Far)

After six years in this job of managing a team, these are some things I aim to do (on a consistent basis) and to remember:

Personal

  • Be yourself
  • You lead by example, whether you try to or not
  • Fulfillment / gratification is different now than it was as a tech
  • Get training – it’s a different skill-set. Always add new tools to your tool belt
  • Take the long view
  • Say you’re sorry

Management

  • Management is different than being a supervisor
  • Invest in your team. Develop your leads as supervisors / future managers
  • Make it fun
  • Set clear expectations with your upstream manager
  • Try things. Make mistakes. Admit it
  • Over-communicate
  • Ask questions, ask questions and ask questions! (levels/layers of understanding)
  • When things go right, share the credit
  • When things go wrong, take responsibility

Leadership

  • Leadership is different than management
  • Be involved in the organization, and use your clout to help it move forward
  • Develop partnerships within organization and with business areas

Do you agree/disagree with any of these? Do you have others that you live by? Leave a comment. Thx.

Technology

No more binary days? Do not despair!

If you’re like me you’ve enjoyed the times this year when a date consists of all ones and zeros, called a binary day, and then if you’re really a geek you figure out what the corresponding decimal value would be. But since there aren’t any more this century, and detractors would point out that it didn’t work if you used the 4-digit year, I’ve had to continue my search (did I mention I work in the Information Technology field? Geek Alert.) Enter ternary days!! You can read all about it on Wikipedia, but it solves both problems: it works great with a 4-digit year like 2011 (or 2012!) and provides many more opportunities for ternary dates in the next two years. Ternary is the base 3 numeral system, where each bit can have three values: 0, 1 and 2. That means that today [11222011] would equal 3622 in decimal! I cheated and used a Base-N Calculator I found online.

So there you go: ternary days. Expect a tweet from me on December 1st…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_numeral_system

http://www.efunda.com/units/base_n.cfm?base_from=3

 

Technology

Ever been tempted to skip a meeting?

I was today. I co-lead our company’s tech review team, and it wasn’t my turn to facilitate the meeting. We’ve rebooted the process recently and it’s been going really well. Attendance (largely developers who choose willingly to come) has been growing. All good things. Well today I’m tempted to skip it in lieu of another project I’m working on — that one is a ‘big deal’ and requires a lot of research in a relatively short amount of time. So I think “I can skip tech review and work on my research project”. Well I’m really glad I didn’t, and it was a good reminder for me. After the meeting I had somebody come up to us, the facilitators, and thank us for getting the team going again. The reminder: skipping a meeting when you’re busy is one thing, when you lead something you need to invest in its success and growth at every opportunity. Don’t be overly distracted by the urgent things and not get to what’s important. That’s something I learned from a little (30 page) book I read in college called The Tyranny of the Urgent. It’s a Christian book, which makes sense I suppose because it was a Christian college, so it ties in faith as it makes its point. But the point of taking time to do the important thing, especially as a leader, has stuck with me.

Faith, Technology