building skills
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Building Skills and Passive Income Through New Products

We have looked at how entrepreneurial and software development skills are an excellent pairing.  This situation becomes even more useful as you get over the hump of building a broad technical foundation.  When you spend your early years mastering the various areas of software development, it opens up incredible possibilities.  The best of these may be the option to build entire software systems on your own.  Of course, size and effort may limit what you can do by yourself.  However, at least you can design and drive implementation. Late Blooming Entrepreneur The usefulness of a side hustle along the lines of creating a product was noted earlier as related to growing your skills.  As that goal becomes less critical, there... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Compliance, Identity and Security Services (Part 2)

This second part of AWS compliance, identity, and security-related services should feel familiar.  These are solutions that nearly everyone needs, and has used, at some point.  Fortunately, these have free tiers and tutorials to help any user get started with them and building them into your environment in the cloud. Cloud Directory This is an all-important LDAP related service.  The power that the Amazon service brings to this universal need is the ability to integrate and go across multiple directories instead of a single one at a time.  There is a free tier along with some excellent examples to help you get started. Guard Duty This is an attack analytics tool that does not require an installation on your servers. ... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

MS Office Alternatives – Free and Low Cost

In this episode, we will look at Microsoft Office alternatives.  The suite of applications can run up to over one thousand dollars which are not in the budget of many of us.  However, there is almost no need to ever pay that amount for your office suite needs and here are some excellent alternatives. Office Online https://www.office.com/ The full products can be purchased via a monthly subscription instead of that upfront cost.  This approach is not only less drain on your budget; it includes so many features that this is by far the best approach to using the MS suite.  This subscription contains online versions of the applications.  However, I do not recommend using those other than for reading documents.  The... Read more

Posted on Google Cloud Tour

Google Cloud Counsel: Using the interface and platform to deploy containers

Welcome to the second part of the video on the Introduction to Google Cloud. In this part of the video, we are going to pick up our discussion of Google Cloud, with a walkthrough on how to use the Google Cloud Counsel platform to deploy containers using the Kubernetes engine. Using Google Cloud Counsel and Platform to Deploy Containers Google Cloud Counsel Kubernetes Engine Google web CLI interface Deploying containers Other videos in Introduction to Google Cloud series: Understanding and using the Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Counsel: Using the interface and platform to deploy containers Using the Google Cloud SDK to Deploy Your Containers Additional Resources you will need: Google Cloud Account Google Cloud SDK This series comes from our mentoring/mastermind classes.  These... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

Software Design – The Composite Pattern

The Composite Pattern is one that is not taken advantage of as often as it might outside of frameworks.  This is an approach to design that allows you to treat a family of objects the same.  It is a quintessential reason for and use of an interface.  The flexibility is critical to being able to handle groups of different objects the same way any individual one would be treated. The Composite Pattern Defined As always, we will start with the “Gang of Four” intent to set the stage for our discussion. “Compose objects into tree structures to represent part-whole hierarchies. Composite lets clients treat individual objects and compositions of objects uniformly.” I think it may be most comfortable to focus on... Read more

it career
Posted on Become a Better Developer

Keeping Your IT Career on Track

One of the challenges faced by everyone that embraces a career is keeping those fires burning.  It is in our nature to want to experience new things and meet different challenges.  Oh sure, there are those that are perfectly happy with a job that is the same day in and day out.  However, we have already established that our nature does not allow that contentment (or resignation). Starting Your IT Career The first decade or so of an IT career is jam-packed with new.  This newness includes languages, tools, problems, and more.  There is just an overwhelming amount of things to learn and master.  That often leads to a feeling of drinking from the firehose every day we go to... Read more