Not Becoming a SILO

As much as all of us try, some of us can become a SILO.  I feel that I've done my best not to let this happen, but it inevitably happened.

So I got my shot in the tech industry when I was less than 6 months in college for Computer Science.  My wife, who works in IT,  was at a happy hour with co-workers and I called to see what she was up to.  I was invited to the party only to find myself talking to her boss (the CTO) most of the evening about what I was studying and an article I read about not using silicon in processors anymore.  This was a Friday evening.  On Monday evening I got an email from her boss asking if I'd like to work on a part time project he needed help with.  Of course I said yes and I was dieing to get into the industry.

 The side project was Salesforce Development for their instance.  If any of you have developed in Apex, it's a huge pain, but nothing good comes easy am I right?  I was extremely thankful and regardless of how bad it sucked, I still pressed on.  Over a few months I feel that I built a handful of decent products.  I had a full time job working for Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals and did the coding on the side.  After awhile I told my wife that I was going to quit my job and focus 100% of my time on working in IT.  The job doing Salesforce was very clear that it was only a single project, I started speaking with recruiters at Meetups in my area.  I had a number of leads, and was hot on the track of getting a full time job doing what I enjoyed so much.  But within 2 weeks of me quiting Mallinckrodt, I was offered a full time job where I was working the small project.

After a number of months doing Salesforce Development, I moved onto the SQL Database team, working on SSIS that fed into our Salesforce Org.  My new boss asked a number of times if I wanted to become a DBA, and after I continually told him that I wanted to be a Developer, he arrange it so I was on the .NET side of our company as a Developer.  Now I know I am a Salesforce Developer, but I feel I picked up C# pretty fast.  I currently still do Salesforce, but everytime a ticket comes up, I tend to not share what I know about the proprietary language Apex.  I'm honestly not trying to keep myself as the sole keeper of knowledge of that platform, but I want to shield others from the pain of developing in that language.

Recently I've had to work a ticket to add functionality to my current code, and got a developer up to speed, but it got blocked and I switched my pair.  I by no means felt that he wasn't capable of understanding the code I wrote, but I felt that it would be faster if I just "did it myself".  At our Retrospective, I realized I wasn't being fair to my team by not spreading the knowledge, regardless of how painful it was.  So needless to say I'm going to make a better effort to spread what I know about the codebase I built and making it so I can have someone to share the pain with.

-Kwiknick

Making an old Laptop/Computer come back to life

I'm a .NET developer and I get a lot of flack about my love for Linux.  I take it with a grain of salt, but when you find the proof in the pudding, it's hard to ignore.  I bought a laptop 3+ years ago when I started college and I thought it was pretty good based on the budget I gave myself.  1 terabyte, 8GB of RAM, i5 processor, what more could you want on a budget. 

Well late last year I upgraded to Windows 10 per the persistent requests from Microsoft that it was the greatest thing on earth.  Now mind you, I have a lot of different scripting languages, databases, sdk's and such installed on this machine.  But if it's such a great OS surely it should handle it.  Well come to find out, it would take like 4 minutes just to boot up.  Opening things like chrome were horrible.  My wife, who is also a developer, hated using my laptop.  I pleaded that I was just going to wipe it and install Ubuntu and all would be well.  But alass we still had to keep our quickbooks on the machine until we did our taxes for our business. 

Well last week that day finally came!  I don't know how many of you have delved into Linux, but I'm a very rule oriented individual, so knowing that Logical Volume Management is the way to go for any install, I had to go that route with my laptop. 

So the first thing to do is copy off all things that you feel is important.  Then create a bootable Linux USB drive (not the one with your backup on it).  Modify your BIOS so you boot up from the USB drive, and select the "I'm just looking" option.  While in the Linux OS you can now setup your LVM.  You start by creating your Physical Volume, then you add your Physical Group.  Now this is where things can get hairy, you now setup your Logical Volumes and there size.  This is important.  I don't want to go into what should be what size as this is based on preference.  After this is set, you can get out and do the actual install.  Now this is where you will actually "mount" your "/", "/swap", ... to the newly created LV's.  I know I should go into more detail as there isn't really a good blog post online, but maybe that needs to be another post.

After the install is done, you can now open a Terminal and do a "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade".  This will take awhile, but will get you going.  After that is done you will almost instantly notice that your machine runs at a nearly insane rate, like a new puppy being traded in for an old dog. 

I know I didn't go into much detail, but if anyone has questions, feel free to reach out to me and I can point you in the right direction.

-Kwiknick