Earlier this year, I threw together a silly little joke app built on Laravel in a couple of hours. I had merely wanted to participate in the Digital Ocean App Platform Hackathon and had no further plans for the app. Another App Platform Hackathon participant liked it enough to contribute some substantial improvements, including a…
Category: Experiences
General life experiences or thoughts.
4 Years at Castos – and Why It Was Time to Leave.
This year marks my 4th working at Castos on our podcast hosting, analytics, productions platform and Seriously Simple Podcasting, our podcasting plugin for WordPress. Today also happens to be the last. Looking back Craig Hewitt, founder, and CEO of Castos, first contacted me on December 27, 2016. He let me know he’d recently purchased the…
Migrating My Cloud Virtual Servers to SpinupWP
I’ve never been a fan of managed WordPress hosting. Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate what managed WordPress hosts do, and they are definitely doing amazing work, but it’s just not for me. As a developer and server admin hobbyist, I prefer to own my own VPS (virtual private servers). I started using Rackspace Cloud…
How Taking the 16 Personalities Test Helped Me Understand Myself Better
For the past three years, I have been having some serious thoughts about my future as a software developer. Since I turned 40 in 2017, I’ve been wondering if the path I was on was the right one for me. This led to a lot of frustration in my work, especially when it came to…
Kicking 2021 into High Gear with an Electronic Standing Desk
I’ve been interested in using a standing desk for about 3 years now. Soon after I moved into my own office space, one of the first things I did was purchase a decent ergonomic chair, and then a standing desk. Not wanting to buy an expensive adjustable desk I wasn’t sure I would actually fully…
Personal Goals for 2021
I’ve never really been the type of person who writes “year in review” posts. Mostly this is because I don’t have any ventures that would be interesting to report yearly results on. What I have done in the past was to set some personal goals for the coming year, which I managed to do for…
Building A New AMD Powered Workstation
If there’s one hobby that I have that I don’t get to spend much time on, it’s building/upgrading PCs. A few years ago I upgraded my 10-year-old workstation/gaming PC, to something a bit more modern. At the time I was working with a fairly limited budget, and so I had to make some concessions around…
Taking on new (old) challenges
Life is a funny old thing. When I left working for an employer back at the end of 2015, I never dreamed I would, in the short space of 5 years time, come back to being employed full time again. Back in June of 2019, I shared the news that I had accepted an increased…
ASUS Zenbook 15 UX533FD review – an Ubuntu friendly developer laptop
I’ve always been a fan of Dell laptops. While often a little more pricey than their counterparts, their laptops are usually well built, typically run Ubuntu without any hassles, and Dell have great after sales service. My last two laptops where Dell. I’d been eyeing the Dell XPS 15 for about a year, and I…
Nobody likes you when you’re 43
When I met my wife in 2000, I had just turned 23. The previous year, Blink182 had released “What’s my age again?”, and she took great delight playing it for me. Today, I turn 43, meaning it has been 20 years since that event. Amazingly, my 23rd year was probably my own personal “rock bottom”,…