TIL is a weekly learning event that I like to run with my teams. Every friday for 30-45 minutes we share 5 minute presentations on something we learned that week. There are only 3 rules.
I like to say that learning is the best part of the job. (It is for me!) And chances are if you learned something someone else on your team would want to learn that too. So this low stakes easy going way …
My Product Manager Skylar asked me today to recap how our product team righted themselves after a year of hardship and they’ve been so good for so long I had forgotten where we came from. It feels really good when things work without friction.
It was a few things we put into practice.
We stripped back our commitments, which was pretty easy because we weren’t delivering well and we had reasonable s…
Someone asked me on a mailing list if I worry about reaching my team's limit in our ability to manage Redis. I wrote a bit about why I think our architecture helps mitigate that risk. I'm not sure I really expressed that I think flexibility through simplicity vs adapters and abstractions is the goal, but I like what I wrote. I think it might be helpful if you're asking yourself, "Should I buy or should I build?" when it comes to lower level servi…
(This post is for all you freelancers out there.)
I got work consulting right out of college. I quit school. It was more giving up spending mtoney on something I wasn't happy with than not wanting an education. (Not to speak ill of Rowan University, but I wasn't happy in the middle of nowhere New Jersey.) When I came home I figured I'd straighten myself out and go back to school elsewhere. My godfather had plans for me in the meantime.
He figured…
This post contains a little bit of bragging. My internet setup at work is pretty simple, we have two T1 lines (not counting our voip trunk or our DID lines but that's sort of telephone) going into two different Cisco PIX firewalls and behind those an old Cisco 2600 to do basic routing.
One does NATing and port forwarding for our normal internet usage, as well as port forwarding from different IPs for our email and web servers. It's important tha…
Occasionally people come to me and ask about websites.
"Francis, I need help on making website."
"Well.. what are you up to? "
"I have an idea of something I'd like to sell online."
Usually it's cookies, sometimes it's t-shirts, a lot of times it it's services they want to offer. Most of these people have zero programming or html experience. If I told them paypal had an api to allow your site to create invoices and process payments they wouldn'…
I had a problem this week. I actually had the same problem lots of times. It was fustrating as hell.
I had quite a few Windows XP instalations to do, with new employees soon to arrive at work, new laptops arriving with Vista, and some old desktops that needed 'decrufting' in their OSes. I have a slipstreamed windows xp cd with sp2 that I like to use. I haven't bothered updating it to sp3 because I haven't made the time and for a while I didn't th…
I almost got into a fight with a guy at Comp USA. Well that's a lie. I just didn't want to buy the $180 fancy Belkin router with the lcd display and curvy exterior.
"Does it have better range?"
"Yes"
"Then the linksys? or compared to the cheeper belkin"
(Which I might add I did buy, it's got an amazingly simple setup and a very strait forward instructions that I would trust my mother with. Never mind I skipped all that because I had to set it up …
We're leaving one of our ISP's here at work. And I was asked to take care of it. We're still on contract but they broke it long long ago. I'll have logs of downed an unacceptably high latency connections and all the excuses they've given us over the months. But I need to start the ball rolling by writing a letter. This is what I have so far...
To: Towerstream
Subject: Termination of Service
John,
We'd like to leave your shitty fucking service …
Spam is a problem, and at my day job it seems to be an ever increasing one. We have two main methods of blocking spam, but lets start at the beginning.
Our server accepts an email to a valid address. (And tells the server to bugger off if there's no account here by that name.) Its scanned for virus's and email client exploits, as well as blocking encrypted archives, scanning inside archives and scanning for macros in Microsoft Office documents. T…
SubEthaEdit is a really nifty text editor with sytax highlighting. What does that mean?
<?php
require_once('core/core.php');
//header smarty$smarty->assign('title','Homepage');
$smarty->assign('location','home');
//end header smarty$smarty->assign('mainwelcome', 'Please choose a component to use.');
$smarty->assign('maincomponents', array(
array('url' => 'dataimport/', 'title' => 'Data Import', 'desc'=>'This is where you manage importing datafile…
I'm happy about the commerce bank being built down the block. The private parking lot was nice and all, and I did enjoy looking at the converted pig box that used to serve as a delivery.. vehicle, but I think the bank will be a lot more useful. I'll be able to walk down the block to count my change for free. (oh and do banking and things)
I was looking for a link on the penny arcades but I found nothing that just showed what it was (it counts the…
I'm tired.
But its well deserved.
Sort of.
So I got up today and went to work. I took a cab because I was late. I had a 3:30 appointment that got rescheduled for 11:30 but some stroke of luck I had arrived at 11:10 - early. Spring and Greenwich (near the west side drive) isn't that far from brooklyn. Someone let me in the building and I took the old freight elevator upstairs. The entire office building used to be some industrial something or othe…
So after 3 days of thinking about it I started making my own knoppix livecd for the purpose of ghosting the machines at 51. I've got to make a debian installation small enough to fit into ram if I want to be switching cds out of of the computers. I'm hoping I have 128MB to play with. I don't think I could do this in 64MB without starting over. I may end up having these dam machines netload, it's just going to go a hell of a lot slower that way. I…
I feel like I've been running virus scans, and network cable for months now and its only my first real week on the job. ehhhh, I'm so tired.
I'll perk up once my checks come in. =)
-Francis
