First, I will be available with a possible start date of November the 28th. I’m currently wrapping up some big projects and completing training for the Home Depot Team and the great progress we’ve made over the last year. If your company is looking for someone with my mixed array of technical skills and soft skills, you can check out my resume & details and initiate job talk with me here!
On to the rest of the news. If you’ve seen me speak lately I’ve mentioned the open source efforts we’ve had going on at Home Depot and related efforts I was working on. Some I’m working dilligently to release via the Home Depot OSS Organization on Github and I’ll still be releasing others soon via my Github account (@Adron) and blogging about it here on Composite Code.
Since this is one of those rare times in my career where I’m not 100% sold on what I’ll do next, I’m open to fielding prospects and seeing what is out there. This is a different approach for me, as I usually determine a company, particular work that needs done and go after that gap. But I’d like to get a feel for what companies feel they need at this particular time. Since I have a wide range of skills, I can step into a number of positions and immediately start to contribute to projects within a company.
Here are some positions I’d find attractive and could provide value for (or build) a team immediately!
Building or Expanding a Team
Need someone to hire, build, and create a cohesive, diverse, and powerful culture of core contributors (developers, designers, advocates, evangelists, or similar). I can knock this one out of the park for the right company. Yes, I’m a bit particular, but I’m not just going to whimsically work for any company (the best people won’t work for just any old company anyway). If you are looking to put a team together and want somebody that can do that for you, I’d like to sit down to a conversation soon. Let’s talk jobs.
Coding Architect
Have some architecture problems, that seem a bit unique or problematic? If you need someone to come in and push forward on design, patterns, practices, and actual implementation then this would also be a conversation I’d be interested in having. I’d be happy to dive into whatever the stack might be (or help decide on the stack): Java (Scala/Kotlin), Golang, Node.js or even .NET (C#/F#) for the right company. Let’s talk jobs.
Development & Operations Architect
Have some architecture that needs to go along with an application and want to build or insure a solid continuous integration and delivery pipeline (or messaging based queue for delivery to production)? This is another possibility I’d be happy to talk about. I really love working with systems to build out reliable immutable infrastructure, data storage mechanisms (distributed, RDBMS, whatever the need calls for) and insure development can continue forward with extremely high confidence levels. Let’s talk jobs.
Developer Advocate/OSS Project Lead
If you have an open source project I’d love to take lead on it and also provide advocacy for that project. This role is not to be confused with evangelist, as that’s a fine role for other people, but I want to be in the code and advocating from a position with the team. I’ve done this before with projects like the Iron Foundry for Cloud Foundry and others, and loved it. Let’s talk jobs.
Mergers & Acquisition Technical Evaluations
This is not something one sees everyday, but I’ve worked in a consulting role and have assisted others with this work before. I find it really interesting looking at prospective ROI, current run rates, but also at the specific details of whehter a product or service can even be incorporated and integrated into the acquiring company. In the case of merging, this differs from acquisition in that both entities and both companies’ products and services will both need to polymorph into a new whole. If you’re company is looking to get into some M & A’s, let’s talk about how I can help.
Besides the above theoretical jobs above, here are a few other things that I would like in a job. Things that just make it all worthwhile, here’s a list.
Work Environ / Soft Skills / Culture
Flexible hours remote or remote (out of office). Whatever the case, I’d like to work with a company that has the ability and acumen to manage the workflow and efforts among team members remotely. If you’re a company that wants to upgrade the development and operational characteristics of the culture, I can also help your company incorporate highly effective remote capabilities.
If there is travel, I prefer to keep it to a productively effective 10-15% of the time. Traveling dramatically decreases overall ability to contribute to actual work in an effective way. I do love to travel, speak, and get involved with the worldwide community but I always like to make sure that this involvement doesn’t stymie me from contributing to actual coding, design, and related efforts. NOTE: If travel is within the Cascadian Bioregion (see image: includes YVR, PDX, SEA, etc) it’s easy to increase my travel to 15-25% of the time as travel within the region is so easy. I probably should include SFO too, it’s super easy to get there and doesn’t cause disruption to daily workflow. (i.e. < 2 hr trip)
Design, build, and communicate. These are the things I like to do. I like to create what will work for high volume or high speed systems, then build prototypes and communicate how these work. Maybe I would be the one deploying to production, maybe the system is production that I’m deploying, but whatever the case is I’m happy to lead efforts on architecture and work with teams to build that architecture.
I love to provide leadership for teams, I love to build teams, and I like working with teams. Albeit I’m particular about team diversity and culture, I can bring my own skills and the ability to bring people together on a team and expand teams. If the culture is off kilter, I can help with that. If the culture is spot on, I can work effectively with that. Whatever the case, I’m a high communication, GSD type of guy provided the right environment and reigns removed.
Technical Skills
I’ve found Google Cloud Platform (GCP) a pleasure to work with lately. That combined with Terraform, Packer, and related HashiCorp tooling has been a lot of fun and provided an extremely high value for us at Home Depot.
AWS has been another I’ve worked with that has been of stellar value, not particularly at Home Depot but at multitudes of startups and during consulting. AWS is still for many things my go to cloud provider option.
Azure is another I’ve used that would be an interesting service to use again. It’s been well over 2 years since I worked with or provided Azure support or consulting. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for this cloud provider since I led teams back in 2010 writing some of the first white papers for the service!
I’m comfortable with C#, JavaScript, Java (mostly), and am looking forward to writing more Golang and happily will dive into Scala, Erlang, F#, and a whole host of other languages.
I’m happy to work with container tech (Rocket/CoreOS) or Docker and I’ll also help keep your company grounded that it might not be the panacea you’re looking for. But they definitely have lots of awesome uses!
I’d prefer a Unix/Linux environment to work in, but I’ll happily help remove Windows Servers from deployment requirements! 😉
Starting with Github, Automatic Page Generation & Jekyll
It’s time for another blog series! This is a series I’m starting to outline that crazy complex site I’m building to prove out all sorts of things, all located at http://adron.me. So far it’s just a site that hold portfolio information for my coding, biking and related information about me. However I’m using this as a base template, that anybody can use via the github repo I’ve created simply titled Me, to start and scale their own personal site. But beyond that, I’ll be using practices and technology that can be used to truly scale large sites with lots of users. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about this series please ping me on Twitter @adron or leave a comment on this blog itself.
Creating a new github project, setting it up with a default Node.js readme file and .gitignore. (Click for full size image)
Next we’ll have the site created and github will display the repository page. On this page you can see that the README.md and .gitignore file have been created with some basic defaults for a Node.js Project. At the top right click on the Settings button to navigate to the settings page.
Settings, get there. (Click on image for full size)
On the settings page scroll down until you see the section for Github Pages with the Automatic Page Generator button. Click that button.
Github Pages Automatic Page Generator. (Click for full size image)
You’ll be directed to create a page, with default data as shown below.
Default Github Pages Project Page. (Click for full size image)
Scroll down on this page and click to create the automatically generated page. You’ll be sent to the page to select a theme. I just went with the default since I’ll delete it later to create the Jeckyll project page instead. Click on publish on this screen.
Default Template Selection for Github Pages. (Click for full size image)
Once this page generates you’ll be directed back to the github repository again. At the top of the page there will be a link to the newly generated page. You can click on this to navigate to it and see what it looks like. Also note that the new repository branch which is named gh-pages is not displayed. This new branch includes all of the files for this Github Pages project page.
Github Pages Automatic Page Generator generated a branch for the new page. (Click for a full size image)
Change the branch to the gh-pages branch and you’ll see that the branch has entirely different files than the master branch.
The default files created in an automatically generated Github Pages site. (Click for full size image)
If you click on the link at the top of the page, you’ll see where the current automatically generated page is and where the future jekyll site we’ll build will be located at. This page that was generated (unless you chose another theme) will look like this.
Github Pages default page with a default theme. (Click for full size image)
Now we have an appropriate branch and we’re ready to toss a jeckyll project in its place. However, if a default template and related content works for your project, that’s a great way to go with it. However some projects may want a blog or other content, just a bit more the default generated page, and this is what we’ll create with this jeckyll site. It’s also very easy to create a jeckyll site and create an image portfolio or a host of other types of sites, all backed by a git repository on github. I’ll keep moving now, on to the jeckyll site!
A Github Jeckyll Site
First get a clone of the site that was generated in the above instructions.
Now we have a good working directory where this is cloned at. First switch branches to the gh-pages branch. Get a list of all branches (the -a switch shows all branches, even the remote branches).
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
git branch -a
[/sourcecode]
The results will display with the full branch names for the remote branches.
The asterisks shows the current active branch. The branch that needs edited is the remotes/origin/gh-pages branch. Check it out with the following command.
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
Note: checking out ‘remotes/origin/gh-pages’.
You are in ‘detached HEAD’ state. You can look around, make experimental
changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this
state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout.
If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may
do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example:
git checkout -b new_branch_name
HEAD is now at d430b0c… … etc. etc…
[/sourcecode]
What this basically means is, we have a branch that is disconnected and not attached to the repository in any way. To fix this we’ll create a working local branch to work with the remotes/origin/gh-pages branch. Do this with the following command.
Now delete all those files in that directory that github automatically created. In their place add a README.md and .gitignore file. In the commands below I’m using Sublime Text 2 command line tooling to open up the files into memory with Sublime Text 2.
For your specific OS you may want to check out the actual jeckyll repository installation instructions. There is more of a break down of various operating system needs for use.
Once it is installed, we’re now ready to use jeckyll to generate static content and even run the jeckyll server to view what our site looks like locally. Now let’s get some content together that jeckyll will know how to statically generate for viewing.
Create a folder called “_layouts” in the local repository. With the “_” at the beginning of the directory, it will not be generated into the static content by jekyll, but the convention is for the _layouts directory to include the templates for creating a standard layout for the rest of the pages in the site.
In the above HTML the {{ page.title }} item is a template variable that will display the title of the page when it is generated into static content by jekyll. Once this is created add an index.html page to the root path of the repository.
Now add the following content to the index.html page and save it.
[sourcecode language=”html”]
—
layout: default
—
<section role="banner">
The banner will go here eventually.
</section>
<section class="content">
<p>
Welcome to Adron Hall’s Github Project Pages all manually created with jekyll!! Please, check out the blog at <a href="http://compositecode.com">Composite Code</a>!
</p>
</section>
[/sourcecode]
Now create a stylesheet and respective static directory for it.
Create a styles.css file and add the following content that Dave Gamache created. I’ve included it below with all the appropriate licensing information and related content. Save this file when done.
/* #Links
================================================== */
a, a:visited { color: #f35f2a; text-decoration: none; outline: 0; }
a:hover, a:focus { color: #FFF; }
p a, p a:visited { line-height: inherit; }
/* #Lists
================================================== */
ul, ol { margin-bottom: 20px; }
ul { list-style: none outside; }
ol { list-style: decimal; }
ol, ul.square, ul.circle, ul.disc { margin-left: 30px; }
ul.square { list-style: square outside; }
ul.circle { list-style: circle outside; }
ul.disc { list-style: disc outside; }
ul ul, ul ol,
ol ol, ol ul { margin: 4px 0 5px 30px; font-size: 90%; }
ul ul li, ul ol li,
ol ol li, ol ul li { margin-bottom: 6px; }
li { line-height: 18px; margin-bottom: 12px; }
ul.large li { line-height: 21px; }
li p { line-height: 21px; }
Now we can use the jekyll command to generate the static content and review it. In a subsequent post I’ll cover how to run this via the server to test out what the page would look like with all relative links.
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
jekyll
[/sourcecode]
…and after execution the following message will display at the command line.
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
WARNING: Could not read configuration. Using defaults (and options).
No such file or directory – /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_config.yml
Building site: /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me -> /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_site
Successfully generated site: /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me -> /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_site
[/sourcecode]
This warning isn’t super relevant just yet. We’ve got a basic generated jekyll site localted at /Users/adronhall/Codez/Me/_site where that path is your path to the _static directory within your git repository. Once the content is verified via the _static directory the site is ready to post.
[sourcecode language=”bash”]
git add -A
git commit -m ‘Adding the index.html and basic layouts template for a starter jekyll site.’
git push origin gh-pages
[/sourcecode]
After it pushes, it may take up to 10 minutes before it displays properly. This is likely because Github has to queue the jekyll command to run to statically generate your content for the gh-pages branch. To view the newly created site and see if the generation has occurred navigate to http://yourusername.github.io/Me/. In the case of my personal site, it’s http://adron.github.io/Me/. Also note, at this stage the page and CSS look pretty bad. But work with me here, we’re going to add elements that will align the theme with the actual project as things come together. This css page however will be a core base for everything we’ll work through.
This concludes part 1. I’ve covered created the Github Pages automatically created templates pages, how to delete those and setup a manually created jekyll site. This gives a huge amount of control to the site, to edit, add blogs or other jekyll and of course JavaScript capable site features.
In subsequent parts of this blog series I’ll cover diving into deployment to AWS (Amazon Web Services), how to setup beanstalk via AWS, setting up Riak for a data back end and how to distribute this web application and Riak to offer a massively scalable site architecture (because you never know when you’ll get slammed with page hits on your personal site righ!) Among all these massive distributed how-to topics I’ll also dive into how exactly I’ve got a template and node.js application up and running via AWS and using Riak. So lots of material and information coming in the subsequent parts of this blog series.
🙂 Please subscribe (see upper right follow link to get emails, and no, you’ll get NO spam from me, just blog entries), comment below if you have any questions & let me know if you’d like me to add in any other how-to articles. Thanks & Enjoy!
At this point you should be able to navigate to http://localhost:3000 in a browser and view the default express.js web app. So now let’s add something relevant to the page. First, I’m just going to stick my name on the page in the index.jade file. My method for editing the file is usually to just use a text editor such as TextMate.
There isn’t really a whole lot to the file yet. One thing you’ll notice though, is the Jade Templating.
[sourcecode language=”vb”]
h1= title
p Welcome to #{title}
[/sourcecode]
This might seem strange at first, but here’s an example of the HTML mess we normally see and then the same thing cleaned up. So here’s the some HTML goo…
[sourcecode language=”vb”]
header.container#header
div.span-24#socialLinks
ul.right
li Follow us:
li
a(href=’http://www.twitter.com’)
| <img src="images/Twitter_32x32.png" alt="" />
li
a(href=’http://www.facebook.com’)
| <img src="images/Facebook_32x32.png" alt="" />
div.span-24#titleContent
div#textLogo
a(href=’/’, title=’GoldMind’)
span#companyName GoldMind
span#textLogoSubtitle What do you have to learn?
[/sourcecode]
Much shorter, much cleaner, and lots less noise when one yanks away all the repetitive chevrons. Now that we’ve looked at an example of nasty HTML and clean Jade, let’s step through how to get certain markup with Jade.
The first thing to note is that each tag is indented below the tag it is included within. That’s how things are nested in Jade, and intelligently, no closing tag is needed. But what if you need the id or class added to the tag. That’s also extremely easy. To add the id just add a hash between the tag and the id parameter like this.
If you open up the layout.jade file you’ll fine some other parts of the Jade Templating I haven’t covered, variables. In the layout.jade file you’ll find the following code.
[sourcecode language=”vb”]
!!!
html
head
title= title
link(rel=’stylesheet’, href=’/stylesheets/style.css’)
body!= body
[/sourcecode]
The title is set to title. Which is actually set in the index.js file. The index.js file has the routing functions that are called from the app.js file that launches the web application. Looking in the index.js file you’ll find the value that is passed in as the title. Change that to something custom for our app example. I changed mine as follows.
Also, to get a little closer to the HTML5 Spec, I changed the layout.jade page as follows.
[sourcecode language=”html”]
doctype 5
html(lang="en")
head
title= title
link(rel=’stylesheet’, href=’/stylesheets/style.css’)
body!= body
[/sourcecode]
With those two changes we should have a custom message that is processed and also HTML5 compliance. Be sure to kill node.js if it is still running and restart it so all the changes are taken into account.
Mashing it Up!
Now it is time to mash this CoderWall & Geekli.st stuff up, but alas, that’s coming in the NEXT blog entry. Stay tuned, I’ll have it up in the morning!
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