A writing portfolio can be tough to maintain, as links tend to change over time. Instead, I've decided to share a copy of some of my contract work here, as well as some of own personal writing.
In software development today, the cloud is a fact of life. And, increasingly, enterprises plan their application… In software development today, the cloud is a fact of life. And, increasingly, enterprises plan their application architectures around multiple public cloud providers, rather than just one.
As a freelance developer, inheriting projects is a necessary evil. Almost every project has legacy code that the team is afraid to touch, but when you inherit a project as a freelancer, more often than not, the entire codebase is “legacy.” While dealing with an unfamiliar code base is tough, what can be even more difficult is getting that code base running in a production environment. Guessing Games Last October, I inherited a project that drove me to near insanity. The source code itself was in shambles for sure, but what made the project such a nightmare was the lack of documentation and communication from the previous developers. This led to me having to reverse engineer the application in order to get it running in the new production environment. I was essentially playing a guessing game with the architecture. I had an idea of what type of resources I needed...
According to a roundup by Gartner, the average cost of downtime for an enterprise is $5,600 per minute. While the data collected was from incredibly large companies, the cost of downtime for even small startups is no laughing matter. Let’s assume, for the sake of simplicity, that your core product is a web app that relies solely on organic sales, totaling $1 million in revenue a year. This amounts to about $2 in lost revenue per minute. This doesn’t sound like too much in the grand scheme of things, but revenue is only a small part of your downtime costs. We also must consider wasted operating costs. Employees’ time and productivity, too, are wasted during downtime. If, for example, you pay $500,000 a year in employee costs, that’s an additional $1 in lost revenue per minute. If you’re keeping track, we’re now at $3 in cost per minute. That’s $180...
When it comes to incident management, it’s easy to fall into an insular mindset. We spend months planning and configuring systems that alert us of any issues within the system, and to cover our bases, we establish traditional customer support channels to identify issues we don’t catch ourselves. While this train of thought isn’t wrong, this approach has led to the rise of users reporting issues they are experiencing in public forums like Twitter and Facebook. Social Media Paving a New Path Social media has become a great way for organizations to connect directly with their users in a casual setting, which has opened up the door for closer two-way communication. Beyond simply being a more personal way to communicate with an organization, social media has also become a more effective way to get help. Because of the public nature of the medium, users have found that when they aren’t...
We’re living in the future. Thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), our world is more automated and connected than ever before. Just about everything, from cars to refrigerators, to coffee machines, has the ability to connect to the Internet, allowing us to micromanage each individual device. This type of automation is an exciting direction for the world to be moving in and the benefits it brings to businesses are huge.
