posts

_{Image by Julia Tulke}

I have been around online communities far longer then I’d like to admit. And I have lived through many waves of community building, discovery and colonization. One of the problems that I have seen happen over and over is a form of gentrification of online communities.

I do not feel that an online community being gentrified is the same as a physical community suffering this fate. I do feel that there are lessons and observations that we can take from both sides of the experience. I also feel that we are seeing this same thing happening again in the Fediverse.

_{Image by tsykoduk}

I am sure that you have heard the news about twitter.

I had spent a lot of time building a heavily curated experience on twitter. Over the years, I have carefully selected follows to build a news stream that appeared to reflect reality.

_{Image by tsykoduk}

I feel like I need to update this about every year, as I tend to evolve my set up. You can see last years post here as well as my thoughts about working remote.

After 6 or 7 years with a standing desk that could not move up or down, I decided to get a sit/stand desk. I did a ton of research (ie, asked a few friends) and landed on the Vari desk.

_{Image by tsykoduk}

As we make things more complex, do we make things better? Are we lowering the bar to entry or raising it?

When I was a kid, the BBS scene was the way that most of us got into computers. That required a lot. I was very privileged to have a C64 hooked up to a 300 baud modem when I was a pre-teen.

How do folks break into the market today? How do they pick up the skills that they need? How can we ensure that everyone has a chance to explore?

_{Image by tsykoduk}

Well, if you have not seen it yet, Heroku is removing its free tier on November 28nd, 2022.

If you use the free tier, you need to decide if you want to upgrade or move. And don’t forget to grab SQL dumps of your hobby Postgres!

I thought that I would take a moment to reflect on the journey of Free at Heroku, and exercise some other hosting platforms.

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At about 7:45am March 26th 2011, I walked up to the doors at Heroku for the first time. I was early because that’s what you did where I came from.

The doors were locked. No one responded to the buzzer.

So I went and got some really bad coffee at the DNA Lounge next door, and waited. As I recall, I saw someone walk in at about 9, and followed them in. That’s how the next chapter in my life started.

A few years ago, I did some performance testing on my blog. I run this blog on a single hobby dyno on the Heroku Platform, and I have seen some performance changes over the past few months. Folks have even been tweeting about performance increases on Heroku, so I wanted to look at my non-scientific tests again.

It’s running on a single Heroku Hobby Dyno, with 512m of RAM. It’s running nginx, and all of the files are static - generated by Jekyll.

I often get asked about my desk setup. I’ve put a lot of research and thought into my setup, but each desk is personal, and should be modified to fit your space.

So, you want to have every change made to the data in a Salesforce Object stored… forever?

I have been involved in and with various infrastructure as a service and platform as a service providers for well over 12 years now. Often I am asked to explain “why use a IaaS provider?” or “why use a PaaS?” or “Why use Heroku?”.

One of the things that I have done literally thousands of times over the last 9 years is show folks the power of Heroku. Over the years I have come up with, dare I say it, the simplest Heroku demo script ever:

How do people who use the Heroku Platform actually use it? What is a day in the life of a Heroku user? What does it mean “to Heroku”? Read on to find out the answers to these and other questions….

One of the frustrations with my current network setup is that the router is very inflexible. For example, it would not allow me to set the Domain Name servers that I wanted to use for my internal devices. It would only deliver the DNS servers that my internet provider delivered to it. And who wants that?

I started working 100% remote in early 2008. Over the years I have learned quite a few lessons, and have really come to appreciate the lifestyle.

Sometimes, we want to be able to route requests based on URL paths easily, or have a front end app that serves data from private back end services.