2022 Wrap-Up of Last Two Years

Folks who care to read my posts, yes, we all went through the Covid-19 shutdowns, mandates, face-masks and insanity of politics.  Maybe we took the (made in China) PCR tests to see if we have had Covid.  IMHO, there is no Covid, Covid is a high-rank operative name for a Government initiative for more control over people - seeing how far people can be controlled before they say "No".

Funny part is, not sure what was accomplished with the bullshit Covid "crisis" over the last few years.  People got sick, no different than seasonal flu, people died - happens all time time. 

What is more concerning is the rushed "vaccine" that the entire "World Gov't" tried to force people to inject into their bodies which later proved to not work and actually kill a lot of people. Especially harmful with children and they (Pfizer) are still trying to push jabs in kids when all of the statistics say that kids can be harmed from those vaccines.

Back to technology, been really growing my skills in cloud-native software development and having fun.  Working from home from all the shutdowns and physical office reorganizing has been a bit challenging but am finally in the acceptance phase.

I have a lot more to say but will cut it short for now.

2021 A Year of Choices

Total chaos from early 2020-2021

Why I Contemplate Leaving Web Development

I wrote this over 5 years ago and realized it was in DRAFT mode.....

20 some years in web development.  I love what I do but as I get older, I don't do what I love. I find myself dealing with more people, egos and conflicts.

Becoming a Senior Developer, the expectation from others that I have noted is that you have matured in...who the fuck knows.  The definition of maturity and seniority is so obscure and confusing to me.

That simple paradigm is not quite possible anymore.  I have to find a way to cope with people with whom I do not like, care not for their concerns, and ultimately, am actually quite dissatisfied with how they perform. I am not an ego-maniac, I just believe in the "walk your talk" idea and I have strong feelings that those around me fall short.  But I also praise exceptional performance. Perhaps my expectations or perception are jaded somehow, I don't know.

I have a lot of pride and ownership in everything I do.  I find solutions for even the most complex issues; I find simple solutions for complex issues.  Perhaps it is my experience that allows me to do that but for some reason, being just a "developer" doesn't gain the right level of respect that I believe it is worth.

Yeah, it's just a job.  Work might as well be a four letter word as I am working everyday to find the happiness when others want to bring me down; such a conundrum.

Not sure if it is life or programming in general but dealing with people is really awful and not fun.

With so many different opinions, behaviors and emotions, it is just too much for me - I just want to build cool web applications without dealing with child-like adults that appear to me to have schizophrenia and bi-polar disorders.

Not stressed, just tired of talking to adults as if they are children.

2019
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I don't feel this way anymore.  I have realized how judgmental that I have been in life expecting so much from from others.  I have changed my perspective and am much happier.

Nobody Read My Posts Anyway

I have come to realize that I don't publicize my blog - therefore, nobody cares.  But that is ok.  I don't write these random words and thoughts because I want someone to read them.  I write them because it helps me get thoughts out of my head to allow me to sleep at night.

I could have the most epic story ever in this blog but because I don't tell anyone it exists, the words and letters typed here are just mine; like a personal journal.

If you are reading, I had the best time at an AWS Summit in DC with a colleague last week.  We did the the meet-n-greet, learned some stuff and crash a party.

I don't know what life is about, even with kids and married 18 years.  I just work with what I get handed everyday; somedays I give hand-outs as well.

Not really sure of the topic for this post, just that I am saying "hi" to the world and that 'we" are all the same.

Until next time...

Epiphany - I'm an Asshole

Despite how much I express dislike for the industry that I am in, there is still something that I enjoy about it.  Perhaps it is the people. 

No matter how crappy I feel somedays about work or when I fail to meet personal goals,  I have somehow managed to surround myself with some great friends.  We all lean on each other and not just for work related matters.

A couple of years ago, I had this grand epiphany that "I wasn't alone!"  Crazy right???  For some some reason I thought that I have been alone in life, doing my thing, surviving for my own needs.  I finally learned that - so is everyone else!!  By the way, that was a hard realization for me, quite humbling and eye-opening.

I want to take a more positive perspective on people, my life and work in general as I have been cynical and angry for too long.  I likely won't change the name of the blog as it sounds catchy.

Next time I post, I want to provide something more provocatively exciting and helpful.

Year of Transition

I feel like I have fought the fight.  Learned so much with web development, web architecture and finally have obtained good knowledge with Amazon Web Services.

Truth is, I think I am now a developer, sys admin, it administrator, security analyst and automation engineer.  Funny how I only get a salary for one of those titles.

I thought that as I got older, things would get easier or at least become more clear-coated.  I was mistaken as I have been learning so much over the past few years with cloud computing, geospatial analysis and weather forecasting that my brain is turning into a computation device.  I am losing my human touch but also enjoying the vast amount of knowledge and learning.

I don't know how to balance the onslaught of information but seem to absorb it pretty well; even at 44 years old.  I'm sure that there will be a time where I can't so I must appreciate it whilst I can - I suppose.

I have always been a technology cynic but haven't swayed from it.  It is an interesting love-hate relationship that I have with technology.  As much as I love learning new things, I hate feeling like I am starting over all the time.  I thought my failures in my 20's would have made me a super-pro at 44 years old.  That isn't the case as I am humbled every day when I try to implement something new and break something which takes a toll on my self worth.

I live to fail everyday, just to learn from my own mistakes - so is life.

AWS - The New Drupal - Rant of Many Things

Been in web development for over 23 years now.  I truthfully started back in 1995 but didn't land my first real job until 1999.  I am now 43 years old.

I remember back when a website/application was a basic HTML page with some simple Javascript that had a Perl/CGI backend and perhaps coupled to a Postgres database. My skills in Corel Photopaint allowed me to create some swanky UI graphics and I was quite proud of my accomplishments.

As technology changed, I adapted and learned VBScript, MSAccess, ASP 3 and PHP.  PHP actually chaaged my creativity as I found the Unix-based servers a lot more customizable as I built my solutions.  I did work in Perl for some time but Perl wasn't apparently progressive enough and was getting uber-bloated.

Many years into the industry, I have worked with PHP using Zend, CodeIgniter, Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla and many other web frameworks.

I no longer write in PHP, I am a Senior NodeJS developer. But with my experience in the past with PHP and frameworks, I learned a "beast" of a toolkit called Drupal.  Drupal was a massive crowd-sourced toolkit that developers can use to build websites and web applications.  It had no "easy" button but a huge community of support and massive adoption. I want to highlight that despite the pros of the community around it, the platform was ridiculously over-complex and "not fun" to build with.

We are now in 2018. The era of Dev-ops, automation, AI, Machine Learning, serverless architecture and other swanky terms that intend to change the compute world. Since my PHP days, I have learned several more languages such as Python, NodeJS and most of the abstractions on top of web development like SASS, LESS, TypeScript and so on.

I had a recent stent with Google Cloud for about six months and learnt a lot about their "toolkit" and cloud capabilities.  I built an entire workflow system in that environment and was very happy that I still had "the chops" to learn something new.

I have actually been using AWS for about 8 years now but never very seriously. A few EC2 instances, perhaps an S3 bucket, a VPC and maybe an RDS instance or two.  The more AWS is evolving, I am starting to see AWS as the new Drupal; another giant toolkit of somewhat interconnected parts that "I have to learn to piece together".  Fuck that!  I graduated past those pains a long time ago and realized that I don't want a swiss-army knife of "someone else's computers and technology" when I can do what I need without AWS!

Problem is that companies have a motivation to downsize IT, and they think that they will save money when they become "cloudified".  They don't realize that the cloud is really just someone else's computers; we still have to secure them and maintain the integrity of their environments. We just transfer IT time/money to software development and start calling ourselves DevOps and get no more pay for the extra work we do.  The company actually loses more people than money for this ignorance.

Money is also lost though. It took our software team about two years to fully understand how to manage cost with Google and AWS when deploying software out there. We spent/lost about $10k per month as we learned how those platforms worked.  We had to play with so many different tools like Redshift, RDS, EC2 and Lambda to determine the most cost efficient means to run our cloud apps.  Yeah, we all now know what the "best" way is do accomplish our financial gosas but we lost a great deal of capital learning this new "Drupal" while "Drupal" profited with all of ignorance and mistakes.

Done with cloud, too much, too complex, not interested.  I just want to program solutions, not invent over-complex architectures and learn cost management strategies of AWS, Google and Azure.