Jeremy's Blog

It’s certainly been a long time since I’ve felt motivated to post anything here. I generally don’t like talking about what’s going on in my life except in small blips, most of which are suitable for Twitter. Using this blog as an outlet to talk about just me or life in general feels like a waste when there’s much cooler stuff I would rather be talking about. Those of you who are looking for life updates can get them from Facebook or Twitter. Those of you who are looking for information on the cool stuff that I’m working on, stick around.

I’ve finally decided that I’m going to take an active role in getting myself out of this almost year-long development-less funk that I’ve been in. I’ve been pouring over information and ideas, trying to come up with something that I could spend my time on and make a personal project of. I actually came up with a few. They’re all Omega Vortex projects from back when we were trying to bootstrap a software company by consulting. The projects never got enough attention because of the consulting and we started to enter the really nasty area of the recession, so the consulting projects also started drying up, leaving us without enough income to allow us to move forward …

Fast forward a couple months where we were wrapping up our last consulting gig as I was taking a job at Highwinds as a Systems Engineer. Presumably to Engineer some cool tools and systems to help make our collective jobs easier. If only I knew then what I was really getting myself into. Honestly, I’m glad I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have been so eager to take the job. Not too long after I started, our more senior engineer and overall badass Systems Ninja (hi, Matt!) got an offer he couldn’t refuse and decided to move on to higher places. It was about that time that my world turned upside-down.

With almost zero previous experience as a Linux SysAdmin, I started a journey that would lead me to a great wealth of knowledge, a much greater understanding of how our systems worked and interacted with each other, as well as roughly no amount of time to spend on any of my development projects. We went through several ups and downs as I came up to speed, learning everything I could about running our Linux systems and how all of our software worked, the way the whole deal was architected, and everything I needed to know to keep it all running. It’s a constant learning experience and I’m still picking up stuff as I go along, but I feel like I’ve come a very long way in a short amount of time and I’m far more comfortable on the command line now than I ever was even back when Linux was my primary OS on personal machines.

Since then, we’ve hired quite a few Linux folks. Less pressure is square on my shoulders now that we have more very capable people to help distribute the load. We’re making progress to working smarter and not harder, spending less of our nights in contests to put out fires and more time with opportunities to relax. Things are becoming increasingly stable which is giving me more free time during off-work hours to do whatever I want. At first, I took this time to goof off and not do a whole lot, because I hadn’t had the opportunity to do so in so long. Now, I’ve decided to transition back to active development work in my free time.

I’m sure those of you who follow me on Twitter noticed that I said I’ve officially started working on ComicShout and OmegaFlash again. That’s not all, and I’ll have a lot to say about these and other projects in future posts. In the meantime, you can keep track of what I’m working on via GitHub and Ohloh.

The repositories on GitHub are very ugly at the moment. They’re essentially dumps of what was in the private Omega Vortex repositories as of last night. A lot of code that never got committed was lost on a few of these. Keep in mind that these projects didn’t get enough love, before. My plan is to fix that. My current focus for a while is going to be OmegaFlash, so don’t expect too much activity on the others for now. As I’m able, I’m going to start putting up more information on my vision and goals for each project at their respective GitHub wikis. Anyone who’s looking to contribute after I’ve put up more info, please fork away. I’ll be keeping an eye on forks and will quickly integrate good additions. Habitual good contributors can be given direct commit access to the repositories.

If I’ve got your interest, please keep an eye on the progress at GitHub and Ohloh. Also, keep an eye on this blog. I’m going to start putting up some high-level overviews of what I want to do with the projects. Until then, I’m interested to hear ideas and suggestions from all of you.