Phoenix

This blog should be renamed to Phoenix…

Since we last spoke, a lot has changed but most remained the same.

I still have three kids, and a dog. I’m still married to the same smart beautiful woman.

I still use Perl as my main language, although I’ve been using a lot of JavaScript and Go (my favourite new language; in 3 years it will be a major contender, mark my words) whenever I can get away with it. I still truly completely hate significant white-space.

I still use daemontools supervise everywhere, but I’ve been playing with Docker more and more, and I might finally retire my decades-old deployment setup, as soon as I figure out a decent way of linking containers across different hosts securely (geard of Project Atomic looks good for this). Also OpenShift Origin is nice. And with version 1.6, Vagrant will finally become my preferred developer environment.

I still use qmail and ezmlm-idx for all my mail and newsletters needs.

I still find that, for small companies, hosting in a cloud like AWS is much more expensive than dedicated hosting, but I’ve learned to appreciate the cosy environment they provide if you have enough scale and some money. I love that AWS BeanStalk supports Docker containers now.

I still buy books, in their natural dead tree format, although I do have a lot of them in eBook format on my iPad. Yes, I finally caved in last Christmas and bought myself a iPad Air. I could not find a decent Moveable Type client though. Yes, I still use MT too, although my ageing setup is no longer CGI-powered, I’ve switched to a Plack-based setup around the original CGIs with Starman.

I still have my (now) 14 years old startup, I still have a lot to do there. But I also needed a new challenge, so I took a new job (well, a year ago). I’m responsible for a couple of eCommerce sites in Portugal, doing very fun stuff with Node.JS, AngularJS, Redis and Perl of course. BTW, we are hiring, ping me if you like any of the previous stuff. It is nice to have sites that make money.

Yes, I still think Redis is the best thing since sliced bread. Seriously. The only thing better than Redis is Git. And possible Camlistore.

I still use MySQL. And I use it as a document-oriented DB, with either compressed JSON or Sereal documents. I do keep extra tables with some of the document attributes for decent reporting though. I’m curious about ArangoDB. And the 9.4 Postgres release, with JSON indexes, looks awesome. Can I haz it in MySQL soon?

I still search with SphinxSearch, although I find ElasticSearch cute.

I still like XMPP, but I haven’t had the time to work with it recently.

I still use Mac’s, they still last 6+ years each on my hands (currently using late 2008 Macbook). I still use my iPhone4, and I don’t plan to switch for at least one year more. I like hardware that lasts that long.

I still think people who believe iOS or Android will ever dominate the other should search history for cases of zero-sum games.

I still love Portugal, although I miss a lot of friends that left us for greener pastures over the last two years.

Health-wise I had a kidney stone. I’ll just say that you should ask for the real drugs from the start. Probably the most painful experience ever…

Best of all, I’m still happy.