Software Engineering

Coding, Python, web development, architecture, and deployment

  • Getting ready for Winter

    Winter seems to have struck early here in Calgary. It’s left me with a bit of a conundrum for getting to work.  All of the transit options in this city suck including driving your own car. The buses are never on time, and always delayed or late The C-Train doesn’t get me to the office, and gets…

  • A New Game Project

    It’s been a while since I’ve worked on an iOS game.  After the disappointing sales from Zombie Tap Out I figured that the game section of the App Store was getting a little to difficult to compete in. I’m finally ready now to get back in the game and start working on something new.  The idea for…

  • ABT: Always Be Testing

    Sales teams often have the letters ABC plastered somewhere next to their weekly leader boards and top salesman photo. It stands for Always Be Closing and it’s a motto that keeps sales people laser focused on their goals. Marketing teams should have a similar motto: ABT – Always be testing. Lately I’ve had the opportunity…

  • Migrating to Amazon RDS

    I’ve been suffering from some scaling issues lately and since my system administration skills are fairly rudementary I decided to opt for Amazons RDS services for providing a MySQL server that is properly built with the appropriate block devices and automatically kept up to date by Amazon. Moving my existing database over to an Amazon…

  • An Easy VPN on EC2

    I’ve become a little bit more paranoid over the last few weeks about computer security. I used to think I will be fine – why would anyone want to hack my computer and find my personal files. But after a bit of reading I’m more concerned about the far more likely situation of mass spying…

  • First Experience Scaling Web Apps on EC2

    Last week I had a bit of a crisis situation with my apps.  After several mornings of waking up to find the server not responsive and 700+ emails waiting in my inbox something had to be done. When starting out I leaned towards keeping the costs as low as possible.  That meant putting several virtual…

  • Writing another (short) book

    I have a book available in for the kindle that I wrote several years ago. It’s been doing ok for sales considering that I have never really done anything to promote it. This past week I have been following someone who is selling a course on kindle publishing and I learned a few things from…

  • Using tmux and Vim

    Working on the same projects from multiple computers can be difficult.  There are lots of solutions for this problem such as using Dropbox to sync files between computers. but that leaves your workspace to start from scratch ie when working from the office last I had these 10 files open, and a couple of things…

  • Write a lot of Code

    I write a lot of code.  I love it.  The challenge and creativity of solving problems along with the hope that the right program could save either myself or many other people their valuable time or provide them something better to do with their time is a great reward. There are about 5 software projects…

  • The singularity

    In the last few days I read two books. I don’t read very many fiction books but these got me thinking. The singularity is a term taken from physics. In the world of physics a singularity is an object or event in space where the laws of normal physics break and thing behave in wild…