Justin Carmony » Goals

My 2011 Recap

Justin Carmony — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 02:00:20 +0000

As I look back on 2011, its been a pretty fun year technology & work wise. While I have a few more draft posts to finish up, I thought I’d hit some highlights from the past year.

PHP

Its been a fun year with the Utah PHP Usergroup. I look forward to it each month, and if you’re in Utah, you definitely should come. We’ve had a lot of interesting talks, such as running your app in different clouds, several MySQL Forks and NoSQL stuff.

I also had a great time going to my first PHP specific conference. While I’ve attended and spoken at other conferences, Tek 11 was a lot of fun. Met a lot of smart and fun people.

As for work, I do almost exclusively PHP work. We power the Dating DNA website and APIs using PHP. All of the Clipish Apps’ APIs are powered by PHP. Alienware Arena, The GeForce StarCraft II Pro/Am Tournament, Thermaltake eSports, and a few other gaming tournaments sites, all powered by PHP.

I’m hoping to blog more about PHP this year. While I use it all over the place, it seems I write more about all the other pieces that interface with and support PHP.

New Technologies

There have been a handful of new technologies gaining traction. We’ve been using Redis in production for quite awhile now, and finding more and more uses for it. I’ve played around quite a bite with node.js, and I see some potential for augmenting PHP with it. MongoDB, CouchDB, and a few other data stores have shown a lot of potential in situations that play to their strength. I’m still a major fan of MySQL, but it’s nice to good options for things that MySQL isn’t as strong at.

New Goals

I’ve been working out, eating well, and such for almost 8 weeks now as well as my wife. The net effect is I’ve lost 16 pounds, and my wife has lost quite a bit too. This was done over the holidays even. We still have some ways to go to get to our goals, but we’re hoping to be successful in 2012 and hit our target goals. We’re even starting to enjoy lifting, cardio, and eating right.

I’m also setting the goal to blog once a week this year. I’ve tried daily, and that is just too much, but once a week is manageable. Hopefully it’ll be relating the technologies I use, to help share the cool stuff we get to use in-house.

Upcoming in 2012

We’re launching a new product in 2012 for Dating DNA, hopefully within a month or so. I’m also hoping to go to a few conferences this year, and perhaps speak at a few of them. Also, on the fun side of things, we’ll be going on a cruise in April, and perhaps a trip to China in September.

I hope everyone had an excellent 2011, and and amazing 2012!

The Skill of Making Habits

Justin Carmony — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:39:17 +0000

Each New Year, people around the world make their resolutions. While I’m not big into making new year resolutions, I thought I would give it a shot. Well, one month later, I was only really successful at one of the goals. I’ve stopped drinking coke completely, and my overall sugary drink consumption has drastically dropped. Instead of several cokes a day, it more of a root beer once or twice a week. However, my other major goal of working out every morning was a total flop.

Then I started to think about how people make changes in their lives. When I just focused on not drinking coke, it wasn’t easy, but totally possible. They say it takes about 21 days to form a habit. So instead of listing out a dozen goals at the beginning of the year, why not tackle a new one each month? Focus on one habit you want to create or change, spend the first 21 days creating it, and the remainder of the month keeping it. By the time the new month rolls around, your new habit is set and ready to go, and time to tackle a new habit.

One reason I believe setting one goal per month is typically one goal requires multiple changes. With giving up coke, I had to figure out what to replace it with. That means I had to keep our Brita pitcher full of water, which I had to make sure we had enough filters. When night time server emergencies occurred, or I had to drive late in the night, how could I get some caffeine?

So February I’ve made the goal to work out at least four times a week, hopefully five. That required me to get up earlier in the morning, which in turn means I had to go to bed earlier. I made sure I knew where my workout DVDs were at, that I pulled the weights out, and I had my workout clothes ready. That way, when my alarm went off, I could get up and go work out.

I can say, this week, I’ve worked out 3 days and tomorrow will make a fourth. Its not easy, but taking one habit at a time makes it totally possible. So from now on, each month, I’m going to tackle one habit. I have a theory, that the ability to make and change habits is an actual skill. Maybe down the road I’ll be able to make two, or even three habits a month. I’ll keep posting updates with how things are going.

For March, I think I’m going make it a habit to bring my lunch to work each day, which will help me eat healthier and save some money. My suggestion to anyone who wants to make some changes in their life, take it one habit at a time each month.

Dear 2010 – My Plans for Next Year

Justin Carmony — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:27:02 +0000

Update: I started to write this post on the 31st, but the good thing is since Jan 1st I’ve been keeping my goals. Only four days so far, but its a good start.

I can’t believe that 2009 has gone by so quickly. Its been a blast of a year. My last post was a little recap of it, but I’m hoping to make the best of 2010.

I’ve been thinking of a few things I want to accomplish in 2010, and here is a quick list of some of them. I’ll blog at a later date in more detail on exactly how I’m planning on accomplishing this.

First off, get into shape! Being a web developer is a pretty stationary job. Especially on days where I work from home. My first goal is to work out 4 days a week before I start my day. So the plan is to wake up, work out for 30-40 minutes, and then get ready for the day. Also, by no means, what-so-ever, am I allowed to check my email first. If I check my email first, I end up getting sucked into my work day.
Second, I’m going to give up Coke / Pepsi for the entire year. Those who know me, that is a tall order. However, I figure if I want to get in shape, those drinks have tons of empty calories I could do without. There is one hitch: what happens when I get that phone call at 2 AM that there is an IT emergency? It happens several times a year unfortunately. So I’m planning on drinking Diet Mountain Dew when that happens. Its not my favorite, which is good, because I don’t want to be downing insane amounts of aspartame or splenda.
Third, increase my productivity & organization. Looking back these last few years, I feel like I have done pretty well and becoming more and more organized. I feel like I’m pretty efficient when it comes to programming, but as always there is room for improvement. I forget things every now and then, and things fall through the crack. This year I want to tighten the screws & get more stuff done.
Fourth, blog my discoveries. I want to keep my blog up to date with my latest endeavors and solutions that I’ve found. Hopefully I can get into the habit.

Over the next few weeks, I hope to go into more details on the goals I’ve outlined. I have several other personal goals, but these are the ones I plan on focusing on now. We’ll see how this go.

My 2009 Technology Recap

Justin Carmony — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:55:31 +0000

Its been two years now that I’ve been a more or less “serious blogger.” I had using the term blogger, since when people hear about blogs, they think of people either detailing their entire lives, or pumping some angel. For me, blogging has just been a way to share information with people I know locally, and those I don’t even know who find my blog via searching. I’ve had a few spurts where I blogged quite frequently, but for the most part it was just here and there.

I’ve gone back and looked at this year of 2009, and the things I’ve blogged about, and I thought I’d give a little recap.

My CSS Conversion

At the beginning of the year I realized I had 100% percent to using CSS. I’m still a little in awe that being such a table junkie I finally did it. There were a few key things that I did to help me learn all the difficult things with CSS. I hope I can help some poor web developer out there understand their CSS a little better.

A Year of PHP IDEs

I really invested some time in trying out and experimenting with several PHP Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). I had been using Zend Studio for several years, however more and more I found myself frustrated with it’s quirks. However, I haven’t had time yet to blog about the new IDE I am using, NetBeans. I’ve made the switch from Zend Studio to NetBeans, and while I’m not completely sold, I’m still giving it some time. Maybe over christmas break I’ll blog some about it.

Interesting Challenges w/ MySQL

While I haven’t blogged about most of them, I have had some interesting challenges w/ MySQL over the last year. One was converting 40 Million rows from a MyISAM engine to an InnoDB Engine. I’ve been having some serious heart-to-heart conversations with MySQL (metaphorically of course) on how I’m going to scale it to millions and billions of rows. I think I’ve mapped out in my head how we’re going to handle it for Dating DNA. That will be one challenge I’ll be addressing in 2010.

New Blog Design

This year I got around to re-designing my blog using the Carrington Theme as a base. I kinda like it, but it still could use a little more polish. One day I’ll find time to give it that extra polish.

Memcached

This year I really got into the theory on how to design an application with Memcached. I’ve decreased the load on several websites by using it, and wrote an in-depth article on the theory of caching, and how to implement it effectively. I’ve been amazed at how well it works, and that I hadn’t used it before.

A Year of Presentations

I’ve given two presentations this year, my Memcached presentation at UPHPU, and my “Real Life Scaling” presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference. I got great feedback from both presentations, and I look forward to what I’ll present on this upcoming year. I’m thinking about putting together a presentation called “Being a Web Ninja with jQuery,” and showing of the dozen of awesome applications I’ve built using jQuery.

Utah Open Source Conference 2009

This year I helped organize and throw together the Utah Open Source Conference. I was made the Sponsorship Manager, and it was interesting trying to talk to companies in a recession about donating to a non-profit conference. I haven’t had a chance to blog about different techniques on how to professional ask for money for something like this, but hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to share some insights.

Things I Didn’t Blog About

There were a lot of things I didn’t get around to blogging about this year. I’ll quickly touch on them here, and hopefully in 2010 I’ll be able to blog about them more.

Web Services – I’ve done a LOT of web service work. Web services provide a unique challenge, since many times its hard to debug them. At my old job, one of the biggest challenges is we really couldn’t debug our web services until all of the other pieces of the puzzle were done. Then we spent long hours with trial and error, debugging via dumping logs. I’ve learned a lot of tricks with PHP and web services. Hopefully I’ll be blog more about those soon.

Performance Tuning LAMP – I’ve had to do a lot of tuning to keep the Dating DNA website afloat. Because of the awesomeness of our iPhone apps, we’ve had a lot of load on our web servers. There are a lot of things you can do to get the LAMP stack to run well.

Alienware Arena – Here was a fun little project I was able to crank out for probably the largest client I’ve done work for: Dell. We made them a website for their Alienware brand called “Alienware Arena.”

There were a lot of challenges to this website, mainly timeline and budget. But we were able to walk away happy with our work, and the Dell / Alienware team were really happy. It was interesting going through and trying to copy / mimic the look and feel of the Alienware website. I’m really proud of what we made.

Never Ending iPhone App Store Saga – Anyone who knows me has heard of the bloody wars that my current employer has had with Apple, their iPhone, and the App Store. The ridiculous approval process, the extremely long wait periods, and Apple’s OCD when it comes to their phone. I won’t say much anything else on the topic, but boy it has been frustrating.

What to Expect with 2010

Boy, 2010 will be interesting. What to expect? I’ll be doing some pretty sick programming in jQuery, as I’ll be adding integrating chat to the Dating DNA website. What else? A lot more when it comes to integrating websites into other social network platforms.

From a business platform, 2010 will be a lot of work spent on taking some great ideas and trying to monetize them. While working on awesome stuff is great, its important to pay the bills with them. I will have an entire year to sign up Sponsors for the 2010 UTOS Conference instead of 2 short months.

Hopefully I’ll get in a better habit of documenting my discoveries and solutions here in my blog. Sharing information is the best way to help everyone out.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday and good luck in the new year! 2010, here we come!

Being a Productive Developer

Justin Carmony — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:50:59 +0000

Doh! I meant to schedule this for Thursday, so oops! Already off my schedule, but oh well.

These last few weeks my productivity seems to have been fluctuating, and it has been irritating. So I’ve decided over the next few weeks to keep track of how I work, see what works well and what doesn’t, and figure out how I can be more productive.

Just as I would suggest any company with scaling/growth problems, I’m going to do the same with me: metrics. You can’t really know where and what to fix if you can’t tell how they are performing. So I’m going to start to keep track of my time in a lot more detail. I think this will help me in so many fronts, and I’ve known for a long time I need to do this. I’ve signed up for a demo account with Harvest, a time tracking software. Why? They seem to have a great interface, both Windows and Mac apps, and iPhone web and native app. So it will be easy to keep track of what I’m doing no matter what or where I am.

Over these next few weeks I’ll write how things are going, see where I can approve, and how that goes.

A Post A Day, Getting Back Into Writing

Justin Carmony — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:00:03 +0000

I’ve decided as of Today, September 13th, 2009, I am going to try to publish a post a day. My reasoning is simple: I want to improve on my writing and proof reading skills. One can never be too good of a writer. I hope to achieve this by several ways.

Smaller, Concise Entries

I have a tendency to write longer, more in-depth posts about subjects that are more like full fledged articles rather than blog posts. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, its difficult to have long drawn out posts and post frequently. These posts can take a week or two to put together over the little spare time I have. I think if I have a more in-depth topic, either I’ll work on it while publishing smaller posts, or split it up into small sets of series.

After examining the blogs that I follow on my Google Reader, I like blog posts that are easy to read in a few minutes, because any longer and I tend to just skim it and skip the details. Hopefully it will be useful to readers, as well as keep me being more consistent in writing something.

Scheduled Posts

While each day I can’t hope to write, I can keep a “buffer” of scheduled posts. So perhaps one day I’ll write three posts, accounting for a day of travel or vacation. Hopefully I won’t fail, but I really do believe my writing can benefit from frequent postings.

Broader Topic Scope

Before I would try to keep my blog posts focused on PHP, Web Development, or some other topic. What I’ve found out is I’ve had great blog post ideas that weren’t exactly about those topics, but I think would appeal to my audience. Back when I was posting several times a week I would have ten times the traffic that I do now, and I think I can my traffic back up. Worst case scenario I just improve my writing skills, which is never a bad thing.

September 13, 2010

Hopefully I’ll see you in a year with 365 more blog posts to my name. I think if I focus and really try to be consistent, I can pull this off. Wish me luck, and I hope you enjoy reading.

Starting Book Reviews

Justin Carmony — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:15:15 +0000

Alright, to help me continue the learning process in my life, I’m going to start to do a book review once a week. The great thing is that this will require me to read a book once a week. Fortunately I have an account to Safari Online by O’Reilly so I won’t go broke buying $200+ worth of books a month. I’ll start off tonight with a book review for Web Designers.

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