Posted on Become a Better Developer

Escalating A Situation and When To Go Over The Head of Your Boss

.  A recent article I read focused on whether it is good for a manager to throw their employees under the bus.  I was thinking about this and turned it around to employees throwing their manager under the bus.  The two situations are not quite the same.  However, I think it is an excellent way to view the case when you have to go to the boss of your boss. The Last Resort I think that it needs to be clear up front that this sort of escalation should only be considered after exhausting other options.  A boss that is either not communicating or not understanding is not a good enough reason on its own.  There should be a thorough and... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS Storage Services – Low Cost Cloud Space

In this episode, we take a look at the AWS storage services group.  This includes some of the older services like S3 and elastic block storage.  If you have not had a look at these offerings recently, then it is worth your time to get reacquainted with them. Fast to Slow Access One of the primary differences in storage types is how fast (or slow) the data can be accessed.  The Simple Storage Service (S3) has become an almost ubiquitous service for websites and document storage platforms.  This is easy to use, and many tools (including WordPress) have plugins that make it easy to offload static files (images and even CSS or JavaScript) to S3 as a form of CDN.  The access... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Free and Low Cost Tools

Financial and Accounting Applications (Free and Low Cost)

This first episode of the season on free and low-cost tools looks at finance and accounting applications.  I assume that these will not be the most fun and exciting applications we cover.  However, they will be some of the most critical to any business. Accounting Applications For You As we go over the applications in this episode, it is essential for you to remember that the best tools will be the one that works the closest to your current processes.  When you find yourself fighting against your application, then it is time for a change. These tools have a range of features and types of business that they focus on.  The good news is that there are free trial periods available for each... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on Patterns of Software Design

A Look at Software Design Patterns

This season will take a look at the software design patterns that we should know.  Each episode will dig into a pattern and how to implement it.  Some of these will be very familiar, and some may open your mind to a whole new approach to software solutions.  In this first episode of the season, we look at why patterns matter at all. Proper Object-Oriented Design Software design patterns are the next logical steps once you are comfortable with OOD.  It is one thing to create objects to model your system.  However, patterns show us ways to use objects to model functionality and even bootstrap our applications with core object-oriented programming principles. There are four main aspects of object-oriented programming. Encapsulation... Read more

server security
Posted on General

A Quick Guide For Server Security

We have looked at security in the past, but we have gotten into the specifics of given platforms.  It can help to start with a common sense list of tasks that will help you lock down server security no matter the platform you are on.  In the modern world of virtual machines and containers all over the network, these general rules may be easier to track and implement. Keep Up To Date If you don’t know where to start on server security, then go to the experts.  The OWASP and NIST sites are an excellent source for the latest information and best practices.  You may think these sites are too complicated or security-minded for you to find them useful.  However, these... Read more

develpreneur podcast
Posted on A Summary Of Amazon Services

AWS – The Compute Family of Services

This season (season 4) will cover the groups of services Amazon provides in their AWS offerings.  Each episode will focus on a particular group and review the included services from a high level.  We have created posts over the last year to go a little deeper into each service.  However, this season will give you some great ideas on where to start and what they currently offer. The Virtual Machine We start our season with a focus on the “compute” family of services.  These cover a few different ways to handle your cloud-based applications.  The first we look at is the traditional virtual machine.  This service starts with the elastic compute cloud (EC2).  We use this service as part of... Read more