Today was my last day working for Track Revenue. It was my first job after graduating from California State University, Stanislaus. I learned a lot in the 18 months as part of the Software Engineering team. I was challenged and there were struggles, but ultimately I came out better than I was before. When I started working at Track Revenue I was still living at my parents and my girlfriend Aubrey was almost 2 hours away finishing her Senior year at Stan State.

All great things must come to an end, unfortunately that time has come for TCB. I am no longer living in the Central Valley and I would not be able to keep the site up to date, so I made the tough decision to shut it down. What was an idea during my last few semesters of college became a surprisingly successful website in Turlock. TCB was a website that showed local bars and restaurants when they were having a happy hour along with beer reviews.

I started my first full-time job almost 3 months ago. I wanted to share my accomplishments from the first 30 days. When I first joined there was no server monitoring and the team had no idea the real time usage of our infrastructure. During my second week I had set up collectd on each server and a central InfluxDB and Grafana monitoring server. We have adapted it a bit since, but we now have a TV set up in the office showing the team the real time usage.

A few months ago I started my first full time job since graduating college. I am working with some great people and making meaningful contributions to the team and the company. Working the many hours that a startup requires has meant I have had many great ideas and frustrations related to my work that could be solved with a small side project. I have written down at least three good ones, but I have no time to work on them even though they may only require a day to build.

I recently built a Markov Generator for Twitter in a few hours. The site will look at your last few hundred tweets and randomly try to find something that you might say. It uses probability from your previous tweets to find words that might go together. I built this to take a break from applying for Software Engineer positions in SF. The results can be quite funny and sometimes you might not be able to tell if it is real or not.

While working on a recent project during my internship I had to come up with a way to authenticate users in our Django application. We use an Angular front-end that makes calls to Django. I am going to strip out all the angular magic, but seriously. You need to go check it out. It makes building front-end applications in the browser stupid easy with just a little of javascript know how.

I always have this bag ready to go at a moments notice. I have perfected my bag after years of college and a few months of being a Software Engineer. With this bag I am ready to handle the day. TimBuk2 H.A.L. 2011 Backpack (no longer available) I absolutely love this bag and it sucks they don’t have a newer version available although you could probably find a close equivalent I am not sure it would have as many small pockets as this one and still have a huge open space where on weekends I can store clothes and bathroom necessities.

I joined the California State University, Stanislaus Signal Fall 2011, and I no longer know what I am going to do without seeing the bright and smiling faces of my fellow editors every week. I am the last staff member to leave who was at the newspaper B.G.D. (Before Google Docs). When I joined the team, we were still emailing articles around, but I feel like I was a key editor in pushing the move to Google Drive and a more online newsroom.

I learned the hard way recently the importance of setting additional Nginx server configurations when hosting both SSL and Non-SSL sites on the same machine. When I created a new server with an SSL connection and did not set a connection reset for the other sites that were not using SSL I found Google and other search engines were showing the wrong URL in my search results. It took almost two weeks for the fix to propagate to all the search engines after I fixed it so don’t make the same mistake I did.

For the past 7 months I have been exploring the wonderful world of running your own virtual private server. It started when I began writing the core for Analytics-App during a hackathon at App.net. I wanted to perform analysis on app.net and be able to find popular posts and people. To do that I needed to track as many events as possible on the service (posts, reposts, stars, replies, follows, unfollows).