Cloud Productivity

Getting the Job you Want Without a Degree

JD Allen

In all the time that I have been working in the IT industry, I have struggled to get noticed at companies that have the jobs I really wanted, and it’s all because I have no college degree. Most larger employers have some sort of Candidate Information System, or CIS, that they turn to when looking for people to hire. They advertise an available job, take in all the applications and resumes, put them in the CIS system, then have it produce a list of the top ten candidates. The problem…

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Productivity

Any Engineer can be a Writer

JD Allen,

One of the least favorite thing for an Engineer to do is write….documentation, papers, pretty much anything. For some reason, I was never that way — I always enjoy writing. I’m no Hemingway or anything, but I have been known to be able to get ideas and information down on paper in such a way that other people can read it and actually understand what I have written. When I started out, I really sucked at it. But I kept at it. At the time I was writing “how to”…

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Productivity

The Yearly Down Week

JD Allen,

Every year, there’s that one week where almost no real work gets done, yet managers expect you to “be working”, even through there is nothing to do. None of my customers are answering their phones or responding to Emails. There are no immediate deadlines for the next couple of weeks. No one is calling me, and the boss is on PTO….but I have to be doing SOMETHING. You all know that week — its the week between Christmas and New Years! So what do you do? Here is a list…

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Cloud MIcroServices Productivity

Pick a Programming Language….ANY Language…

JD Allen,

Now that Cloud Computing and Containers are starting to come to the forefront, the decision of what programming language that I should study in order to be more ’employable’ is becoming less important. Just about any programming language can be used to create Docker Containers….some more so that others. Here’s an Article I wrote about this over on my LinkedIn profile: Pick a Programming Language…Any Language…

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IoT OpenShift

Run Mosquitto MQTT Broker on Red Hat OpenShift

JD Allen,

An MQTT Broker is a great candidate for running as a Container on something like Docker, Kubernetes, or Red Hat OpenShift. While there are several blog posts about running on Docker, I didn’t find one about OpenShift. Red Hat has a JBoss configuration for running Fuse as an MQTT Broker, but it seemed like a lot of work for a simple MQTT Broker. So….I went out and figured out how to get Mosquitto up and running on OpenShift (Well, MiniShift, but pretty much the same thing.) The latest and greatest…

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Productivity

Get an Email URL from Airmail 3

JD Allen,

Just like Apple Mail, the Airmail 3 app has the ability to create an “URL” for each Email message.  This is important if, like me, you like to reference Email messages in other apps like Evernote or other project and time management apps.  I personally use a Tiddlywiki ToDo setup where I just paste in message URLs into my ToDo items so I can always call them up later. The trick, however, is how to get that message URL??  There are several Applescripts for getting message URLs from Apple Mail,…

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