DEV Community: Mike

I write terrible code, and I'm OK with that.

Mike — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 15:58:47 +0000

I admit, I write terrible code. It's beyond spaghetti. Let's forget this whole MVP stuff.

Writing terrible code is actually a great thing, it allows you to look back on it in time and revise it, use your further knowledge to rewrite and implement it a better way. If you've never written terrible code, you've never learned how to code.

Thank you, DigitalOcean!

Mike — Tue, 23 Apr 2019 16:04:08 +0000

As my business launches SaaS products, we evaluated cloud provider options. Having previously used AWS and own hardware, I naturally went towards these options.

After discussion with colleagues, we decided to try digitalocean. It suited our budget and needs, we deployed a few droplets, a loud balancer, cloud firewalls, and hooked up our monitoring. 24 hours later we had a good environment to deploy production on.

As we started scaling, digitalocean was able to scale with us. We then hit a road block - all our nodes ran out of space. That's when we dived into Spaces, which works perfectly for us. We setup a few spaces for test and production, and this allowed us to scale even faster.

Now, we rely on Digitalocean entirely in production.

Products used:

Managed Databases
Cloud Firewalls
About 25 droplets
Spaces (3 instances)
Load Balancers (2)
Volumes
VM Backups

Satisfaction: 100%

Cost VS AWS: We are saving almost 350$/mo with digitalocean compared to AWS.

I would strongly recommend digitalocean to everyone!

We're hiring a freelance web designer!

Mike — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 15:10:41 +0000

Hey all,

My company is seeking a freelancer for web design work. It's a new SaaS product with a clear focus. You will be involved in designing the website and backend control panel.

About Us:

Founded in Canada, we're an all remote team of 3. We're in the process of building some SaaS products. We love the remote culture.

About You:

You have a keen eye for colors, subtle element placements, and love to work remotely. You're able to guide the team on how the front-end built should be implemented properly. You don't take no for an answer!

How to apply:

Send me your CV (along with some past work if you've got any to share!) to mike@bun.cx

Compesation:

This is a freelance position, and will be paid hourly or weekly, depending on your availability and workload.

Thanks!

When can you safely make an assumption when developing anything?

Mike — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 02:05:30 +0000

Suppose you're developing an application (eg. website, mobile app, backend app, etc) - when can you safely make an assumption when developing it?

For example, if you've tested Creating an Item, Deleting it, and Reading it's info - is it safe to assume Update works?

Furthermore, if you have your tests automated, how much trust do you put into your tests?

On going freelance full time.

Mike — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 01:50:22 +0000

After over 10 years working, I've branched out on my own. I loved my office, the people I met, the things I learned, the stories I heard and equally told. The horrors, the good days, the just plain old weird days. They were all days that I'd never take back. Many ask, if I've had a secure job for years, why leave? No, the work wasn't boring, we did exciting things - we took a 20 year old product and made it look and feel like a successful start up. We built an ecosystem around our product, opened it up to remote developers, freelancers, you name it.

It was a strange feeling when I decided it's time to go freelance, I wanted to experience the world more on my own, having some successful side projects, I wondered, "how hard could it be?" - it's hard. I'm still learning, but I'm happy to declare I'm profitable. Living wise, it's rough come the bills, but I'm penny pinching everything.

The end goal is simple: a remote self-owned business, with one or two employees (where everyone matters!), which is profitable that we don't have to sweat every second. With a few products launching soon, I'm hoping to take on my own full time employee come June or July this year.

I'm half way there, and lots to go. I'll be bringing updates to the feed "#freelancejourney" about the struggles, the high moments, and the low moments of growing a business from zero, into something profitable enough to work full time. Feel free to follow the feed, and if you want to reach out via message and lend a hand - all is appreciated! (all products will be open-source, with paid editions)

Finding the right coding partner?

Mike — Tue, 12 Feb 2019 18:40:02 +0000

Have you found your coding partner? One who you can code with, enjoy the time, but spar with on critical decisions to make the best decisions?

If so, how did you meet and why do you feel it works great?

Why you may need a dedicated homelab.

Mike — Fri, 08 Feb 2019 02:21:30 +0000

There comes a time in a developers life, when their bottleneck becomes their machine they are operating on. Maybe you want to learn new tech? Play with some type-1 hypervisors and automation? A homelab is for you.

Enterprise grade server gear is up all the time for auction on eBay, for the price of a brand new Macbook Pro, you can get approximately 3 Dell or HP servers, each with 144GB of DDR3 memory, and likely a 48 port switch. Imagine what you can do with 3 servers, and 144GB of memory. I've done exactly that.

Homelab...?

I'm sure many of heard of battlestations, they're incredible paradises for gamers, and alike to have a dedicated place. I'd like to imagine we all want our own variant of them (maybe not as extreme, but our own "quiet place" we can just let our hair down and relax). My battlestation is a server rack, some servers, switches, IP cameras, and a Mac Mini (more coming soon, of course!)

One afternoon, I set out and bought used Dell servers. Plenty of affordable ram (DDR3), and storage (mainly SAS, some SATA/SSD). They're not the most energy efficient, but they do the job. The cost of running these full time, with a switch, only added about $7 per month to my electrical bill (which is about the price of a digitalocean droplet, OVH vps, etc).

What can you do with a homelab?

A homelab is endless, for starters, learning how to setup a managed or unmanaged switch, and creating vlans. Once you've got it setup, try setting up a firewall like pfsense or vyos. Try routing traffic from external to internet. Take it a step further, install a hypervisor of your choice (eg. EXSi, Proxmox, or even just straight libvirt on any OS you like), create virtual machines, install a private Gitlab, setup Confluence and Jira for your personal projects. You can get really crazy. Spin up that plex server for your family/friends, create a VM to stream your music collections. It's literally endless, you can always try new software without damaging your existing computer.

Why should I make one?

If not for anything, do it for the learning experience. Throw it on your resume. While you're at it, you might as well find something to learn with them, learn a new technology stack, host yourself a gitlab and blog - try something you've always want to try, but never had the [bottleneck] for. CPU bottleneck: X5690 cpus and E5 low powered are quite cheap. RAM bottleneck: You can occasionally pick up ~200GB of DDR3 for under $300 on eBay. Storage bottleneck: Ebay, or spend the extra money and just buy brand new spinning disks or SSD/NVMe drives.

How much can I get a homelab started with?

At a very low estimate, if you've got a spare computer laying around - just reformat it to the OS you desire, and get tinkering.

If you want to go a step further, buy a DLINK unmanaged 5port switch, buy a Tower or Rackmount server (Dell R or Dell T series, commonly are 110, 310, 410, 610, 620, 710, 720) (rule of thumb: anything generation 7 and above is usually better, due to less noise from servers, power costs). You can surely find Dell T710s on eBay almost everywhere for sub $300 CAD.

Want to go all out? Check out ubiquiti networks (also has a sweet domain "ui.com"), buy yourself a cloud key (or host it in a VM on your hypervisor!), buy a managed switch, buy an access point, set it all up. Spin up an active directory or LDAP server, have your access point use that AD/LDAP server for authenticating people on your network. Be in complete control, all the time.

You don't need fancy hardware, my first homelab server was a 8 GB DDR3 computer, it ran 10 VMs fine on an i3.

For developers, sysadmins, devops: I'd always recommend a homelab, play with technology, play with stuff you do and want to do. Become experts in the one thing, share your knowledge, and help others.

Let’s discuss bullying in the workplace and depression.

Mike — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 02:02:36 +0000

Bullying in the workplace happens every day.

If you saw someone being mistreated in the workplace, regardless of age, gender, social status, would you step in? What would you do to help this person?

Overdepressed, Stressed, and Under dressed.

If you’re ever feeling lonely, sad, stressed, or even depressed about work, or life, what do you do to mediate this feeling, and how does it help you?

Making the switch from laptop to desk

Mike — Sat, 03 Nov 2018 11:53:56 +0000

In light of the new affordable Mac Mini 2018's, and the extra bonus of it being user-upgradable in terms of RAM, I've already got a NAS with tons of storage available so 128G SSD is effectively a boot drive.

It's affordable for a base model with 16G RAM, throw in some SO-DIMMs to make it 32G, it's now a small tank. I currently run a MBP 2015 13inch - it's nice, but the ports broke and a logicboard replacement is $800 - just shy of the price of a new Mini.

My gameplan

Ditch the MBP 2015 13' in favour of Mac Mini 2018 with 16G/128G
When I'm "on the go" and want to sit at my relaxing lazyboy chair, have a bluetooth external monitor, with a bluetooth keyboard/mouse - take a tiny hit in terms of latency (not major due to distance), but get the portability I desire - I work exclusively in my office at my desk even with a MBP, and never tend to take it anywhere far, so I'm not taking a big hit using a Mini - it fits my lifestyle accurately
Use the thunderbolt 3 ports to connect two more monitors (2x4K) on top of my existing 4K monitor, to make 3 4K monitors

What's your gameplan if you were to make the switch?

Do you have a space to "geek out"?

Mike — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 18:36:37 +0000

As I sit back in my office chair, I wonder if anyone else has a dedicated space that they can just "geek out" in? A space full of technology, whatever it may be - low tech / high tech - something they hold proud in the world of technology?

For me, it's a room with 7ft long desk, with my computer and external monitors, printer, and a punch of posters/stickers, and RGB lighting where I can go and "geek out" when I want /or/ need to.

What's your geek out space?

Looking for beta testers for Edge Application Delivery Network

Mike — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 22:53:52 +0000

Hey all:

I’m seeking a few beta testers to test our newest product, a Edge Applications Delivery Network - it includes global sync, and 10 POPs, syncing data in real time within 20ms of publishing.

What it can be used for:

dynamic applications
serving static files and content
running code right at the edge
natively supports Docker containers

Beta testers will get a developers guide to write application rules, rules are written in Typescript, and run at all our edge nodes.

In order to become a beta tester, leave a comment below, or connect with me on the dev chat. I will give you access to the network.

Cheers