Personal
Picture this: mid-20teens, I’m contracted to build an iOS app and a website for a Cable TV hardware company. The app’s a custom RF calculator—Joomla’s in my blood, so I know it’ll anchor the website too. I deliver the app, spot-on, and start asking about the site. Then the rug gets yanked. Investor politics kick in—some bigwig’s buddy gets the gig because the site needs to “pop” for their IPO. My Joomla pitch? Too boring, too “technical.” They go WordPress. Weeks after launch, it’s hacked—tens of thousands of spam emails blast out, their domain’s blacklisted, and ahead of the IPO, they can’t email a soul. The IPO flops. Company’s dead in a year. I’m left shaking my head—Joomla could’ve saved them, but nah, they wanted “pop.”
For my wife's poultry show (Yellow Rose Classic), each of the show sponsors gets a banner. Unfortunately, most of her sponsors either didn't have a logo, or their logo was a low-quality image. That is not to say the images were bad; they were just not something we could scale up to banner size without significant loss of quality. So I get to do some SVG work.
Supporting my wife's hobby, I find myself making another commercial. It's a good cause, the Texas Independent Flock Owners Association (TXIFOA) supports and promotes agriculture in Texas.
Two years ago, I had the opportunity to take on a unique challenge outside of my usual software development work in the name of school safety. I was asked by Texas Defense Force Security to create a commercial promoting their School Officer Program. The program teams volunteer private security officers recruited from the local community and local law enforcement agencies to provide a safe and secure learning environment for students.
Read more: Promoting School Safety with Texas Defense Force Security
Our first time coming to Edom for fireworks. For the past 5 years I've been helping the Whitton Fire Department put on their show, but the show was cancelled this year. I don't often get to watch the show, it was nice!
Oh my goodness - I ran across some old hard drives and decided to take a peek at their contents before sending them to be recycled. I'm glad that I did! I found some things that I thought were gone forever!
Documentation and links related to my JoomlaDay Texas 2019 presentation.
September 28th, I'll be in Austin speaking at Joomladay Texas. My topic is "Scaling Joomla", and I'll be going over the types of scaling (vertical and horizontal) as well as myths surrounding "the cloud".
I'll be using a portable cluster in the presentation to illustrate some of the benefits of horizontal scaling, as well as the pitfalls.
It should be fun. I'm bringing cookies for my audience.