I love the fall colors. Just wish they would last a bit longer.

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I’ve been wanting to blog weekly for sometime now, but the pressure to write some detailed how-to tutorial and the time commitment to do so usually keeps me from blogging, so I thought I would write more of a weekly status update and just share some of the things I’m working on and maybe some links to podcasts I’ve listened to.

I really enjoy listening to podcasts and even though I do love a good interview style podcast I really enjoy the weekly podcasts like The Bike Shed, Accidental Tech Podcast, and The Art of Product because I get to hear about the hosts progress on the things they are working on. Since I don’t really want to produce a podcast of my own I thought I would try something similar in blog format.

Work update

This week for work I learned a lot obout Elasticsearch and setting up an Elasticserach cluster. Even though I’ve been using ElasticSearch through Kibana for many months now I haven’t really understand the underlying technology behind it. So far I really like the ELK stack and think it solves a log problem I’ve been trying to solve for years as a programmer, especially if you don’t want to ship your logs off-site but you want them all in one place.

Personal project updates

For whatever reason I’m currently working on lots of little projects and I’ve been putting them on hold for the most part because I’ve been so busy at work. I mostly have these little personal projects so that I can practice “Deliberate Practice” and get better at my programming craft.

This weekend I was able to make progress on TinyTodo, and SkillSift. I’m now for the most part finally able to use TinyTodo personally to track my todo’s and got the app deployed to my server. Even though I’ve done zero css work on TinyTodo I’m hoping to just make it public soon, so that other people can actually use it. Apparently if you aren’t embarrased when you launch your product you waited too long.

Even though SkillSift is still very rough and minimal I also went through the trouble of deploying it to my server this weekend so that I can continually push changes up and don’t have some giant deployment nightmare whenever it is actually ready to launch.

This weekend I also updated some of my minecraft hosting scripts since I played minecraft with my daughter on Saturday. We have a server that we spin up on Digital Ocean whenever we play and then backs up the server to Dropbox when we are done and destroys the server.

I did study a litle bit for my aws cert this week, and started going through some of the IAM stuff and worked on creating a user and assigning them permissions. I spent a lot of time this week on this Elasticsearch stuff, but I’m hoping this week I’ll be able to spend some more time studying for my aws cert and going through my terraform book.

Podcasts

I usually end up listening to quite a few podcasts every week, so I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the ones I’ve listened to and one link or highlight from it.

The Art of Product - 19: Gourmet Ruby with Avdi Grimm

They talk about the value of avoiding code. Which is a very interesting perspective coming from developers.

“I will not write a single line of code to deliver this content” -Avdi

Greater Than Code - 50: Open Source Anarchism with Steve Klabnik

One of the things they talk about is Succession Planning in terms of open source projects so that projects don’t just become abandoned.

Track Changes - Jenn Schiffer Relates to Developers

This is a new podcast that I haven’t heard of before but I beleive I stumbled apon it because I follow Jenn on twitter. She is currently working on Glitch which I haven’t really had a chance to use yet, but they are using Discourse as their support forum which always makes me happy.