solvaholic

A big part of my job since 2017 has been supporting a Ruby on Rails app. ‘Til now I’ve gotten by on my infrastructure, server, and troubleshooting skills. Ruby on Rails has been a blind spot for me, though, and it’s time to fix that.

Back in, probably, 2012 I came across a paper about action mapping that concisely listed “Leadership’s new roles in an environment of unpredictability”. Three bullet points cemented in my mind what effective leaders needed to do.

I made new notes about setting up a GitHub Pages site locally. With fewer containers this time. Special thanks to @BDHU for updating the Minimal theme with dark mode and attractive-yet-simple links lists.

Coming back to GitHub Pages after nearly four years has been fun. And educational. Spending a little time around Ruby, and a lot of time around GitHub, has filled in some illuminating perspective.

These are my notes about setting up your GitHub Pages site locally…

This summer I started learning about Kubernetes. Once it’s up and running, Kubernetes is an orchestration layer that makes it really super straightforward to do rapid deployment, high availability, and scalability with Linux containers. That sounds fantastic! But .. what’s a Linux container? and can they be useful without Kubernetes?

I used GitHub Pages’ site.github.public_repositories to list all my public Repositories. I wanted to list pages in a Collection in a similar way for the solvahol/ghkb project. Because GitHub Pages addresses the project as a subdirectory of the owner’s Pages site, this was less straightforward than I expected.

Jekyll’s Collections provide powerful tools to organize content. Ben Balter put together an excellent write-up about using Collections with Jekyll. And the Jekyll documentation is super helpful as well.

Where did that stunning blue and gold dragon come from? And why is it eating its tail?

In July 2016 I put a blog up on WiX at promiscuousideas.com. I loved the easy-to-use interface, huge feature set, and beautiful templates. I’ve thought and learned a lot since then about what I want promiscuousideas.com and idsx.co to do, and it’s time to move them to GitHub.

“Hey, we should <bright idea>!”

When we write that idea down there are several questions we’ll want to answer before we do much else with it. When we make a Repository on GitHub for one of these bright ideas, we can populate some Issues and a Project by default.

For exercise I put blog.solvaholic.org on Amazon Web Services S3 with a CloudFront front-end. I used Hexo to build the content, and pushed it up with awscli. That works and was totally worth it, and now I’m ready to do away with that complicatedness.

Each time I go to use a Node.js package on my laptop I wonder how to upgrade Node.js and its packages. Homebrew would make it easier, so next I’ll wonder why I’m not using that. For now, though, here’s a way to upgrade Node.js and packages…

You can get from “Amazon Web Services is cloud stuff, yeah?” to AWS capable and fluent - and Certified! - in ten days. Here’s how…

The news is sensationalizing one view on an issue. Your friend just can’t get past an annoying situation. Your kids are frustrated because their teachers don’t make sense. If you care, then treat it like a problem. And put some solvahol on it.

Want to turn your smartphone into an intelligent virtual assistant? Tried building cloud-based mobile apps and had trouble with the kludge of tools online? or are you unsure where to start?

Author a static Web site locally in hexo, and publish directly to a Amazon Web Services’ S3 bucket. You’ll use hexo, a text editor, and the AWS CLI.

This is a summary of the post.

Hello there

This is some content.

As a problem solver, you have a limit - a threshold, a tolerance - for how many times you’re willing to solve the same problem.

When you tire of solving it, you’ll eliminate the cause, or automate the solution.

I say, “Assume there’s already a solution.” You say, “You know what happens when you ass-ume haha!”

When you’ve decided that you need to solve a problem, you can dig in and start creating a solution…

Are you willing to try something, to risk failure? Are you willing to make a mistake?

Your world is changing. Your knowledge and understanding will expire.

You’re driving along the road. Your car’s tire goes flat, so you pull over to the side of the road and stop.

If you want to know why the tire went flat, you get out of the car and …

It’s tempting to treat problems as individual transactions. Cut into bite-sized pieces, problems look like this…

When you’re doing one thing, you’re not doing everything else.

Are you spending your time on the things most important to you?