It’s hard to believe but this site is four years old. Wow! Time has flown, and I’ve learned a lot – hopefully these years have been helpful for you too!
December 31st, 2011
This year started off with a foray into Rails, an experience I won’t be rushing to complete. Most of my time was spent building a small application during the Christmas break in 2010, but in 2011 I moved that site into production and wrote a little bit about separating production and development values (a feat I repeated for the Play! framework, which I actually like, later in the year). I think the only thing I really like from Rails, and this is a bit of a stretch, is the database migrations.
Having moved entirely over to a LAMP platform professionally, and getting good at the security nuances plus everything else, I reminisced a little about some of the creature comforts I missed in C#, like operators for default null variables. But when I discovered Time Machine on my Mac, there was no going back – until the company switched directions and I got thrown back into .NET development.
That’s right – back to .NET, and deep into the Windows Azure cloud. I dealt with things like figuring out which is better – table storage or SQL Azure, and figuring out the nuances of their multiple SLAs, and how to ensure we actually have Azure Compute instances on-line when it hits the fan. At this point I have a pretty good handle on Azure’s strengths and weaknesses and my overall impression of the platform is very positive. If I continue building sites on the Microsoft stack, I would definitely continue to use Azure – it seems more expensive than other options at first glance, but it has some serious computing power behind it and takes the majority of administration headaches off of my plate. It really has enabled me to, for the most part, just focus on development whereas I was spending an increasing amount of my work day on system administration issues when supporting the LAMP platform.
Scalability and high availability have been on my mind a lot, and I’ve been looking into some more ‘off-beat’ database solutions like Drizzle for my transactional needs, as well as speeding up existing deployments by moving as much as possible into RAM. There’s always a battle between changing the way we work to take advantage of the new paradigm or changing our existing configuration to get some more life out of it.
The whole cloud computing buzz feels tired but has enabled a whole new class of online business. If you have a lot of commodity hardware you can achieve, very cheaply, feats that were only possible with an expensive dedicated network just a few years ago. Sure, it adds a lot of new choke points you will need good people to help sort through, which is giving rise to a whole new sub-category of programmer specialization to make hiring in 2012 even more challenging.
There is a downside to all the cloud computing, though, as we learned during the high profile Amazon failures – backups are important. This includes geographically-redundant systems that most organizations don’t have the experience to deal effectively with just yet. Even so, the biggest lesson I learned was never let your server run into swap space or your performance will nose-dive. The growth of this site even prompted me to move more of the site into memory which prevented me from needing to spend a lot of money upgrading my infrastructure.
Social media continues to grow, with companies realizing they can’t control its effect on their business in traditional ways and less-than-useless cons ruining it for everyone by selling CEOs on cheap gimmicks.
Since my third child was born in February, I’ve definitely taken some time to sotp and reflect on what I want to work on, why I want to keep working, and what the next steps are career-wise and life-wise. I want to provide the best that I can for my family and 2012 is going to see a radical course change as I start to shift gears and begin building something that will really last, even outlast me. When will my website start paying my bills? I don’t expect it will.
I learned a lot by running dozens (over a hundred?) job interviews in the past two years. Ignoring the old adage that you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, I learned that you can tell with pretty good accuracy whether or not someone will be a good match for your company within the first five minutes of an interview. I’m less interested in hiring people with domain knowledge than I am in surrounding myself with the most intelligent developers I can find – one is a skill that can be taught, the other is an aptitude candidates need to bring to the table. Really, when it comes down to it, what I really want is for people I hire to stand up for themselves (since they are adults) and make me look good by being awesome at what they do.
I also learned a lot by being responsible for some very large projects; things like the importance of continuous integration.
What’s next in 2012? Look for mobile device use to continue growth – every developer who plans to stay employed needs to know something about mobile development, because it’s going to be ubiquitous with regular desktop programming very soon. Now that version 0.6 has been released with Windows support is Node.js ready for prime-time? I had the opportunity to play with it a lot over the past few month – look for a book early in the new year co-authored by yours truly.
August 9th, 2011
Used properly, LinkedIn is an incredible tool for finding new opportunities and connecting with potential employers. As your network grows over time and people move on to bigger and better things, the connections you make in the early days can easily be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of salary and other business opportunities.
LinkedIn has three things going for it:
- A thorough resume builder that is intuitive and begs to be completed
- An easy way to find and connect to professional colleagues
- Peer recommendations – this is what makes LinkedIn valuable
People who compare LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are missing the point. Users of each network are seeking different experiences, and LinkedIn serves an excellent purpose when used “properly” as a networking tool.
Beyond giving a plain resume (which is, by its very nature, more detailed and relevant than most of the bad paper resumes I see day-to-day), LinkedIn’s user recommendations option gives potential employers a more organic view into what it would be like working with you, as seen by your colleagues.
There are a lot of elements that go into a good recommendation, but the goal should be to strike a balance between supervisor, co-worker and subordinate recommendations. For example, your direct boss may say you’re an excellent manager, but what about the people reporting to you? A vote of confidence from all levels gives a much clearer picture than a potentially biased recommendation from a single source.
The beauty of recommendations is that you must receive them from people connected to you, which means requesting them in some way. If you don’t have any recommendations already, how do you start?
The easiest way to get someone to write a recommendation for you is by writing one for them. Yes, you can nudge the person, officially request a recommendation, bug them in person, etc but the ego-boost someone will receive by getting a recommendation from you is, in many cases, enough incentive for them to respond in kind.
Don’t get upset if someone does not return your recommendation. The system only “works” when recommendations are given freely and honestly – so if you don’t truly recommend working with someone, don’t give them a review on LinkedIn. There is really no downside to this.
April 21st, 2011
The best way to keep visitors engaged in your website is by delivering your experience in as little time as possible. The average visitor will only stick around for a few seconds, so it is important to get them interacting with your content fast. The first thing to check for, of course, is any bottlenecks in the initial page generation. Once the web page is being generated quickly, we can turn our attention to the next biggest culprit: the connection to your client.
Downloading files directly from a web server is costly, even if you’re using an efficient server like nginx for static files.
A content delivery network (CDN) can help speed up the process by storing your content in data centres around the world so they get served to your visitors from locations that are physically close to them. This results in fewer network hops which makes the files download faster, and reduces the overall load on your web server so you can focus on doing more interesting dynamic application stuff.
At one point, CDN services were only available to companies with deep pockets and huge websites, but these days anyone can set up and use an inexpensive service with their regular hosting provider.
Check with your host to see if they offer a content delivery solution. The two providers I use for my blog, Media Temple and Rackspace both have excellent services. If you are using a WordPress site, check out W3 Total Cache, which provides an all-in-one package for managing your files and optimizing the overall speed of your site.
April 14th, 2011
The title is misleading. Although I know a small number of people are making enough money from their blogs to generate a living income, the truth is the majority of people who try to blog for profit will fail to produce substantial revenue. That doesn’t mean the blog won’t be a critical part of their money-making strategy, it just means that a bigger strategy is needed; one in which blogging is just part of the equation.
Direct Income
It is possible to make direct income from your blog, of course. The two most common models of this are ad-supported (Google Adsense is common, but higher-quality and paying ad partners are available to larger blogs), and pay-for-use where your reader pays to access premium content you produce.
The problem with direct income schemes is they take enormous amounts of traffic to work. The average user will not pay or click on ads so in order to get your 1/1000 conversion to pay off you need to have tens of thousands of visitors to your blog. That would have to be a really interesting blog.
Affiliate Income
A more common way for bloggers to make money is by hawking other people’s wares on their site for commission. Depending on the affiliate, the income from this can blow ad-supported revenue out of the water.
Marketing for Other Income
Other writers choose to use their blog as a medium to advertise some other product they have created, or as a vehicle for increasing their professional profile. In these cases the blog may or may not additionally use another model to generate income, but the focus is not on making money.
April 7th, 2011
I am seeing an alarming trend on my beloved Facebook. Several of my friends (ok, I haven’t really kept tabs on them for years) have become “social media experts”. You can tell who is pushing at this stuff because they start tweeting dozens of times per hour, washing out all relevant contact from your home feed. They start using @reply and #hashtags and linking to other “social media experts” blog postings about the importance of Social Media and oh-goodness-your-company-doesn’t-understand-this-like-I-do-but-I-guarantee-results-for-you!
Honestly, this kind of behaviour has become textbook newbie behaviour.
The Buzz Bin has put together a list of ways to vet would-be social media experts.
I swear if I ever see ‘social media guru’ on someone’s resume, I will not hire them.