Justin Carmony » Personal

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.

Project Management & Entrepreneurship

Justin Carmony — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:51:51 +0000

My dear friend Eric Ping pointed out I only had a few days left before I’d break my year and half record of posting at least every month. I was wondering what to write about, and last night I figured out what to write.

Yesterday after going to dinner with Joanna, my wife, we went to our guilty pleasure store: Barnes & Noble. Since I already have the entire Wheel of Time series to re-read for the upcoming books, I walked over to the technical section of books. I looked over the majority of titles, most of them for beginners learning a new type of language. It got me thinking. Over the last five years I have spent most of my time and energy working on becoming a great web developer. I’ve been working hard on my design skills, searching the web for examples and resources. I’ve been trying to make my PHP code more maintainable, efficient and clean. These last years I’ve been asking myself over and over “how can I do this better?” “How can I be a better developer?”

I can honestly feel that this hard work has paid off. I feel my skills as a web developer have grown greatly, I have an awesome job as a web developer that challenges me every day, and I really enjoy doing what I do. However, there is one caveat: I don’t want to be a web developer for my entire career.

Don’t get me wrong, I love doing web development. However, in twenty years, I don’t want to always be the guy doing the web development. I’ve always wanted be the guy in charge of the developers, talking with clients and developers to direct and guide the process.

So after looking at the programming books, I decided to check out another section. I started browsing the small business section and selected a book called “The E-Myth Revisited.” Between last night and today, I’ve read about half of it and have really enjoyed it. It has its flaws, but overall a lot of the ideas are really good, and many of the pitfalls I’ve seen in a lot of small businesses are addressed.

I’ve decided over these next few years to study up on running a business and project management. I think with my current employment there is a lot potential for expanding my career. I feel if I start studying and learning about being more than just a web developer, when opportunities present themselves I’ll be ready to seize the moment. I’m still going to keep on learning more and more about web development, but I feel broadening my learning will be a great benefit.

Father Sued Over Freedom of Speech

Justin Carmony — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:22:31 +0000

I thought I would step in and write about the total non-sense that has been going on with the Linspire/Freespire debacle. Today I just found out my father, Kevin Carmony and ex-CEO of Linspire, is being sued by Michael Robertson over “… cybersquatting, trademark infringement, and unfair competition…” for “$100,000 and other damages.” You can read the entire post on Kevin’s blog. He summarizes the real intent behind this lawsuit well:

The lawsuit even states, “Although the FREESPIRE mark was recently assigned as part of an asset purchase, [Robertson] expressly reserved all rights in and to all claims against Carmony arising from the freespire.com domain name and website.” Now, why would Robertson want to carve out that one thing to hang on to? He’s no longer involved with Freespire, so why does he care? Is he desperate for money? With Robertson’s companies struggling and laying employees off, does anyone really believe this is the most important thing Robertson should be concerning himself with? His motives are pretty transparent–to suppress freedom of expression that is critical of Robertson.

This is a nuisance lawsuit, intended to silence my freedom of speech. I will defend my right to free speech by continuing to point freespire.com to my blog and keep reporting on Robertson’s disturbing actions.

Enough is enough Michael. You once stated that the “The Record Labels Want My Minivan” playing the victim of a personal lawsuit. Seems rather hypocritical now that you’re suing my father. What about my stocks in Linspire? I was hoping to use them to help pay for school or a down payment on my house. But of course my house, car, or personal money doesn’t matter to you Michael, since you drove Linspire into the ground and sold it’s assets off in a single year. I’m glad to see you valued the shareholders to much. Seems its only a crime when its “your minivan” at risk.

If you want to read up more on Michael Robertson & the Linspire/Freespire issue, you can checkout my father’s blog.