This was the year of doing things I’ve never done before.  Normally my review is a “I learned this technology or wrote something in this programming language” but this year was different.  Both at work and outside of work I was forced to leave the comfort of my introvert

Back in my early days of creating corporate applications using the waterfall approach, our main form of feedback was asking the user what they thought about the feature we just implemented and then we assumed(and hoped) they would use that feature. If the functionality ran slowly we would try

Back in the summer of 1987 I was a neophyte to the world of hard work. I had just graduated from high school and was headed to the University of Georgia in the fall but I had a whole summer of nothing to do so my father suggested I apply

After cutting the cord back in November I had my doubts as to whether I would be able to stick to it but I’ve found out that I really don’t miss anything at all. I do have a couple of things I need to edit on my last

I decided about a month ago after talking to some friends who had cut the cord to cut the cord myself and here’s what I’m planning to do and what I’ve done. I wanted to make sure I could get the 4 free broadcast networks OTA(Over

I’ve been wanting to write something about this for a while but it’s been super busy as startup life can be.  So this is it.  I left a large media company last November after deciding to test the waters(not because I disliked the company but felt like

Building an AMI with packer that includes autoupdate on lauch smithatlanta: I started looking into this last year but got side tracked with life and projects at work. I finally decided this past week to try and get this working after a co-worker said he needed this for an

I went through several hours of messing around with a couple of node modules that seemed to work but I had issues with so I ended up using the Node AWS-SDK as is.  Here’s some examples of a PUT, DELETE, and GET. PUT fs.stat(parsedFile.path, function(

This is the 4th time I’ve been thru layoffs.  The first layoff was a complete surprise but the next two had tell tale signs that they were coming.  I’ve realized that the biggest sign of impending change is a major slowdown in workload.  I remember going to my

If you tried to do what I said in my previous blog post, you’ll realize that the data volume does not get copied if you try to export  / import a mongoDB container. In this instance, you’ll want to create a dedicated data container(https://docs.docker.com/userguide/

I ran into a situation this weekend where I needed to copy an ElasticSearch Docker container(already populated with data) from one Mac to another so I did some research and this is what worked for me. 1. Get a list of all my containers docker ps -a 2. Take

A little over 3 years ago I was given the opportunity to step away from my day to day job of doing the usual Microsoft Full Stack(MVC / EF / SQL Server, etc) development with a team for 10 years and jump into the world of Open Source doing NodeJs and

Earlier this summer I hooked up my old one wire system and the OpenSprinkler Pi to the Raspberry Pi but that wasn’t enough. :) I decided to add my old X10 system to it as well.  I was really surprised that all these serial devices have worked so well together.

I’ve really gotten into gardening and water conservation in the last couple of years so it made sense to connect my geek side to my outdoors side. So this weekends project was phase 2 of a 3 phase project.   Phase 1 which wasn’t too technical was buying cheap,

I started looking into this last year but got side tracked with life and projects at work.  I finally decided this past week to try and get this working after a co-worker said he needed this for an application he was working on.  So here are the steps I

This is an issue at the company I work at.  I see 4 obvious kind of situations at work here: 1. The developer just doesn’t want to learn something else. 2. The developer is so busy at work that they don’t have time to learn other alternatives. 3.

I started out my developer life playing around with different Tandy computers my dad brought home in the early 80’s.  I was very lucky to have parents that saw my interest in computers and purchased an Apple IIe in the mid 80’s.  For the next 2 years I

I was messing around twitter last week and noticed this new project called packer.io.  What it basically does is allow you to build a repeatable image for virtualbox(as well as amazon, digital ocean, and vmware fusion) from a pretty small json file.  Here is a template(example.json)

I’ve been trying to get Node.js working with Riak using the Riak-js npm module and I never seem to hit my console logs in my callbacks.  I do see the calls being logged with debug set to true and no errors are thrown so I’m wondering

I needed a quick REST API for a project I was working on in Node and this really fit the need.  Was really surprised at how easy it was. The app.param function was extremely useful. schema.js var mongoose = require(“mongoose”), Schema = mongoose.Schema; var Network = new Schema({     Name: