As a followup to my last post , I'm going to assume that based on my previous thoughts you've now gone to your management team and advocated successfully for some work-from-home days in your life. More likely, of course, is that you're fortunate enough to be in a corporate environment where remote work is already embraced, whether that's for just some days during the week or month, or all of them. However you got to this point, though, this is where I come back in to impart my advice for working remotely in a...
And the time is still now, even if you're in a different time zone from all of your coworkers!
I've had a blog post in mind for months about how to most effectively work remotely, as I've been doing it for virtually the last ten years; in fact, I've been in my current organization over nine years now and of that time, all but eighteen months has been either partially or fully remote, mostly from more than a thousand miles away. Before I get to that post, though, I want to do this shorter one about why exactly it's valuable to work remotely for both individuals and the organization...
As mentioned, the genesis of the logo update was the desire to make another special version of the logo to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary. Very few sites, particularly hobby sites, can claim to have survived so long, and I wanted to do something special to commemorate the time spent in development and among the community. Conceptualizing the new, sleek iteration. The...
This is the first "Project in Detail" blog I've done about something that wasn't either explicitly web code, or heavily web code with some design enhancement along the way. This time around, I'm documenting the process involved in revamping the logo for Caves of Narshe to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary (on July 31, 2017).
As someone who didn't come into software engineering from a traditional path, it was way down the line before I first heard the term "Rubber Duck Development." Everyone else out there probably knows full well what I'm talking about already, and there's really not that much more I can say about the core principle. I will do so anyway - in short, it describes a simple trick of the human brain: when trying...
I'm a middleman when it comes to my own webserver. My sites collectively are too large to exist as separate shared hosting with a webhost, but I also want to keep them all organized together and have the flexibility of managing each individual site that would come with a colocated or private server. If you're familiar with non-enterprise web hosting at all, you've probably just said to yourself "he must be on a VPS, then," and you're exactly right.
A couple months back, I read in Wired (in hard copy, no less, because I'm one of those weirdos) Clive Thompson's column "The Next Big Blue-Collar Job Is Coding" . It resonated with me at the time, but I sat on the article until I could also link to it, and now it's too late to really weigh in on it, because as soon as it hit the web it blew up. The post has nearly 125k shares on Facebook as I write this, in fact, and way more Facebook comments than any of their recent posts that don't involve...
One of the first things I blogged about was my new-at-the-time Carbonite account , though I didn't actually write the post about the service per se , more about how their speeds were shockingly slow for my initial backup. I write about them again today because as of now, I've just finished a two-week-long process of encountering a data disaster and the slow road to recovery, and Carbonite will again be a factor (but again not the main thrust of the idea).
What you missed in part one was mostly me explaining that I like old video games and I've lived a lot of places. Full steam ahead into part two!
The Design In Practice To make this idea work, I needed to establish the requirements for the design, just as if it were a fully-scoped project. I needed the design to...
I hadn't done a whole lot with my eponymous website in a decade; not as if the thing gets a boatload of traffic, but as someone who makes his living and has his major hobbies all connected to the web, it was a bit awkward to have something quite so stale. In the time since the site was last refreshed, I've learned a great deal about design and development, changed my focus personally and professionally, and lived in a great many varied places, and that's something I wanted to reflect in my own personal webspace. Hence, this new alvies.org site.
