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).

After years of using Windows computers and lusting over Apple’s MacBooks and MacBook Air I finally got my hands on a new 2013 MacBook Air. I have only had little exposure to OSX when I had a hand me down MacBook circa 2006 and it gave me a decent, but slow and aged experience. It didn’t sway me away from Windows, but that is likely because it was early on the OSX path somewhere around version 10.

Today is it! I have learned a lot in the few short weeks I have been at IRIDEX Corporation and it has been a wonderful and eye opening experience and if I could I would stay longer, but alas I must finish up school. IRIDEX is a leader “developing, manufacturing, and marketing innovative and versatile laser-based medical systems, delivery devices and consumable instrumentation for the ophthalmology and otolaryngology market” in the heart of Mountain View, California.