Blogging

It’s that time of year again — time for a retrospective on how I did on my goals for the year. I had 5 main goals for 2015: Job Hunting Conferences Blogging Programming Language Design Writing an Agile Book Job Hunting I got pretty lucky on this one. My main contract with Mercy got extended several times. Amos and I must have been doing a good job of keeping the customer happy. We even made it through a couple rounds of layoffs. I’m wrapping up the gig at Mercy now. I’m working one day a week there, as the project winds down. ...

January kept me pretty busy, so I’m a little late to this. But better late than never. And as an Agile practitioner, I don’t think personal retrospectives should be limited to one time of year. Review of 2014 Last year I wrote a blog entry listing my goals for 2014. As far as New Year’s resolutions go, I was relatively successful — about 50% of my goals accomplished. Unfortunately, my Open Source contributions weren’t as strong as I had hoped; while I released some of my own work, I didn’t do much else. I did increase my blogging; getting in on a weekly blogging pact helped immensely. I also increased my participation on the This Agile Life podcast to a level that I’m happy with. But the accomplishment I’m most proud of was giving a presentation at RubyConf. ...

I’m considering moving away from WordPress, for a couple reasons: Security. There have been several vulnerabilities over the past few years, and I’ve never really had a high level of confidence that it’s secure. In addition, I now find the whole PHP model — every web app running as a single user, instead of leveraging UNIX permissions — to be broken. Speed. I started to realize a couple years ago that a blog engine should generate static pages. The static pages should be updated whenever new content is added. There’s really no reason to re-generate the page every time someone wants to read it. At the very least, Server-Side Includes (SSI) or Edge-Side Includes (ESI) should be used. Now that I’m starting to actually blog consistently, it makes sense to change. But before I move to something different, I want to be sure that I find all the features that I need. This post is my thought process about what I want. ...

Welcome to the BoochTek blog. BoochTek, LLC is a small web development company, based in St. Louis, Missouri. We specialize in Ruby on Rails, jQuery (JavaScript), and PHP. This bog will be a place where we can share some of our experiences in web development, Open Source, programming, and technology in general.