Category Archives: Personal

Hiatus Update

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Been a bit since I last posted. Between work and school (mainly work), I’ve had to put my personal projects on hold to help me maintain my sanity.

Work has picked up quite a bit between taking on new responsibilities, the business make a fair number of fast moving changes, and in increase focus on our AWS migration. While I’m enjoying the new responsibilities and opportunities (including a crash course in PostgreSQL administration), there is just a lot going on right now, with a lot of new knowledge I’m having to pick up.

Add to that a new college course learning one of my least favorite IT topics (networking) that includes a group project. I’m okay with group project; but when I’m already spending 8 hours a day essentially working on multiple group projects constantly, I can’t say I’m all that thrilled having to manage another when I’m home. Granted, the fact that I always seem to end up being the de facto project manager for every group project I’m in, that really isn’t helping. Online courses are meant for people who have a limited schedule and need to do course work whenever they have free time; meaning, THE CHANCES EVERYONE WILL HAVE MATCHING SCHEDULES TO WORK TOGETHER IS LIKE WINNING THE FREAKING LOTTERY.

Okay, off my soap box. Hoping that once this cluster of a class is at least finished, and work starts to calm down some, I’ll have enough energy to focus on my project.

 

Personal Pitfalls

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So my last update mentions I need to work on my CSS. Problem is, I still need to pull my style sheets off the server to start scrubbing through them. This has to be my biggest personal pitfall. Fortunately, I don’t have this problem at work. However, by the time I’m done with work, I can’t say I’m always that eager to jump straight into another project. Typically, I hop on my computer with the intention of being productive, then I open Steam.

The unfortunate part about this is that I really want to work on this. Thinking I need to start setting up blocks of time to just start chipping away at this. Setup my own Agile workflow. Oh crap, another pitfall as I’m typing. Thinking of a new project while still needing to work on my current one. Focus, need to focus.

What to do, what to do…

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So I created this blog with the idea of documenting things that I’m working on from a developer standpoint. Now I just need to start documenting things. Between this blog being on my own server in AWS, what I’m doing at work, and what I would like to start doing in my free time, there are definitely things I can start with. I just need to get past my mental block of “maybe I should start with this, or maybe I should start with that”.

Doesn’t do me any good to have ideas if I don’t start working on them.

School Work Round 7

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In the home stretch. No lab this week, just need to work on finalizing my course project. Final week to add an adjustments, content, and enhancements. Once I’m done I’ll need to validate the sites accessibility and then share it with two people to provide feedback on what they think about the site. Once done collect everything together, write my final report and submit. All that is remaining is the final next week and I’m done.

Definitely learned a fair amount about HTML and CSS. As a matter of fact what I learned about CSS helped me a lot with my blog. Over the weekend, I migrated my entire blog onto my own server in AWS with WordPress installed. While I was able to find the same base template, it didn’t have as much customization as it had on WordPress.com. Had to use Developer’s Tools in Chrome to find the classes and ID’s that defined each element and tweak them to get the site to look like it does now. While I’m certain the site will continue to evolve, I’m happy enough with the site, I’ve made it live. Even figured out how to force the site to use HTTPS and setup my own SSL certificate for the site.