Normally I only post about technical things on this site, but today I am going to talk about some friends. When I first started out at the University of Minnesota I lived in Territorial Hall. Down the hall from my lived a couple of people I became Friends with Jason and Jill. We became friends along with many others in a large group and it made for some amazing memories of my college years.
It has been a crazy couple of months. Since I last posted I made a trip out to San Francisco to meet the rest of the team I work with (and had a great time). If you live in Texas there is no better time to visit San Francisco then at the end of July. It was a welcome break from the heat. I had a great time and realized when I was out there that I hadn’t been out there since 2005, so I was over due for a trip. I had forgotten how much I love that city it is a really fun place to hang out (though not a place I would really want to live).
I need to apologize for the lack of posts for the month of May. It has been a hectic month or so. In April several interesting opportunities were presented to me and I decided to make a change and go back to working for a startup company. It is no secret to anyone that I really enjoy startup work, but it is always hard to make a change like this, as I was very fond of the people I worked with, and had an amazing boss and loved the project I worked on. One of the things I love about working for smaller companies is that you have this amazing opportunity to have a huge impact. You can make the difference between no revenue coming in and the company prospering down the line. When you find yourself part of a 13,000 employee organization that brings in say 3 Billion a year no matter how great your efforts you can never really move the needle and for me shipping something that really impacts the company is immensely rewarding.
On Thursday afternoon I attended a free Internet of Things Coding Workshop put on by AT&T and Texas Instruments at AT&T’s M2M/CD Foundry in Plano, TX. While this type of programming isn’t really relevant to what I do in my day job I am interested in the topic so I asked by boss if it was okay if I attend and he was fine with it. The hosts were kind enough to provide us with a free lunch and I think there were about 50 attendees. This was the 3rd session they had done and it sounds like the others were even busier. They had a 4th session that evening on the topic as well.
I have sort of taken for granted how easy all the updates are for a Wordpress site. If there is a security update Wordpress just goes up and updates itself without me doing anything and the plugin community is so active there are frequent updates to all of the plugins I used. Because it always just works I don’t really hesitate to run any of the updates when I see them on the site.
Recently I read this article about health benefits of doing a 72 hour fast. I thought the idea sounded very interesting. A few years back I tried the Primal Diet (a less restrictive paleo diet) and had great results with it. I think I did that for an entire lent, and continued it past there. I ended up losing 40 pounds and it was the easiest weight loss I have ever done. At some point though I sort of moved away from primal as my favorite food in the world is Mexican Cuisine and after that Italian, so it is hard to enjoy my favorite foods with that as a lifestyle. That being said I do eat many fewer carbs now than I did previous to that. I have also experimented with Bullet Proof Coffee, but the version with coconut oil and butter, not the medium chain triglycerides. When I tried that out I didn’t notice as much of a benefit like I did with Primal. Though I could see the Bullet Proof think combining with Primal very well.
Sorry for the lack of updates, but I was on the end of project march and then off on paternity leave. I am hoping to resume regular posting soon. The project was very successful, we had a big push and brought another 120 tables online in our new Cassandra Cluster and migrated that data from SQL Server. Along the way it has given us a few fun design challenges.
Initially we were working around some limitations in keys in Cassandra. In SQL server often you will query on a column that may be null. In Cassandra none of the columns in your primary key can be null, which means you can’t query on that column since Cassandra doesn’t allow you to do adhoc queries. One work around we started with the obvious solution is to use a secondary index. However Datastax will tell you in general not to use them. We found in playing around with them in production we have just had issues with them. They seem to either get corrupted or be out of sync in some way with the tables very often so end up having to run a repair on that index to get the correct data. As a result of this we are completely moving away from secondary indexes. In the end it gave us some interesting data design problems, but I think we will end up with a much more resilient system in the end.
I saw a bunch of people discussing this article. Basically it is saying that after 20 years IPv6 has only reached 10% deployment rate. I actually expect that number to start growing faster now since IPv4 addresses have been exhausted. At a certain point the cost of rolling out IPv6 will be less than horrible solutions like Carrier Grade NAT if the ISP doesn’t have enough IP Addresses. I always expected them to start rolling out IPv6 on Cell Phones given the number of devices and the growth rate, but I haven’t heard about anyone doing that yet.
About a month ago I got an email from Amazon that they had introduced a nano instance. This was a very timely email as I was just nearing the end of my free year of AWS (your first year they give you enough of an EC2 budget to run a t2.micro instance for free). I had been running this site on the micro instance (as why not when you aren’t paying for it), but yesterday I got a bill for my EC2 usages. It was $11.46 for the month of December.
As my holiday vacation winds down I decided it is time to figure out what my themes are going to be for 2016. Last year I did a fairly good job at hitting the themes I laid out for the year, so I Am curious to see how it will turn out this year.
At the end of the day whether or not I do any of these things doesn’t matter too much to me. It is sort of just setting some sort of milestones to track how my year is going. The main purpose of this blog is just keeping myself accountable so that I am always sort of improving a little bit each day, so if I find that I have nothing to write about then I can see I am not pushing myself hard enough to learn something new. Here is to another great year.