Life with Tim

It's that time of year again. A time to reflect, a time to set life altering goals, and a time to accept. This year has had its ups and downs. For me personally 2016 was full of life and excitement. I got engaged, started a new job, I bought a new car, and we decided to build a house! Four pretty big changes in my life and all of them have been excellent changes. I love my lady, my car is sweet, I love my job, and I'm super excited about the house. We also took some excellent trips, C graduated (hello Doctor!), and we went to some auto races. What's not to love? My 2016 //start 2016 rant So with all that amazing happening locally the remainder of the world was practically doomed. 2016 was rough... lets be honest. We saw the passing of countless actors, musicians, athletes, officers, and civilians. So much so when I saw a new headline of a death I wasn't even shocked. It was almost expected at this point. Headlines were full of greed and hatred at all new levels...

Life is full of changes both personal and professional. Monday marks a big change for me professionally. Monday I start a new job at a new company. I have had a fair number of changes in my career. I've gone from Java developer, to Oracle Database Administrator, to Oracle Everything Administrator, to Java Developer, to team lead/Developer, and now to a new company as a Software Developer. I really enjoyed my time at UW-Madison. I learned a lot and grew my skills as a software engineer. I also got my hands dirty with some system operations. A great group of people with fun opportunities. I'm moving to a newish (8 years old) company called Spredfast. The Spredfast social marketing platform sifts through millions of pieces of social content per minute, so brands can participate in individual conversations or amplify relevant content across any digital screen. The platform allows customers to engage in real-time. Combined with comprehensive data, Spredfast creates more interactio...

Trello.com did not pay me for this endorsement, although if they wanted to please feel free to reach out :).  I'm not going to explain what Trello is other than it's a fancy lists of things. To Do lists on steroids, if you will. You can read that at  https://trello.com/home . I'm more going to focus on how I use Trello. I started using Trello a couple years ago and I found it really helps declutter my thoughts. Being an adult and stuff, I got a lot on my mind. So I created a board for "Life Thoughts". This has a couple columns. The basic "ToDo" list. These are for general wants, whether it be something I want off Amazon, to life goals. I also have some shared boards with C. We have one for our grocery list. It uses the Labels to say what part of the store its in. It has a simple "To Get", "Got", and "Meal Plan Ideas". It works out really well for us. When we are almost out of something we just bust out our phones and ad...

At work we are blessed with the freedom to work with a wide selection of technologies. This is a wonderful thing that lets the mind be free from restriction. Where this becomes an issue is when teams try to work together. There is a history issue at work to work in silos. Teams work independently on the idea with little input from outside contributors until the product is done. This is getting better though brown bags and user groups but still needs some work. One area that needs help is chat clients. I found people love using there own chat client for their given team. We have a campus wide XMPP service which works fine. Its just chat after all. If that was it, there would be no point to this blog post. There is also Skype for Business that DoIT started implementing. Honestly XMPP is much better for chat, but some people deem that they will only use Skype and nothing else.  Then we have teams using Slack. Slack has a lot of great features, but one disadvantage is you have to sig...

I had a fun experiment with my GitHub blog , but I decided I'm coming back to blogger for now for simplicity. It was a clever exercise in utilizing github's gist site to generate a collection of files (posts) with some configuration (another file in the gist), and generate a blog from it using github's REST API, angular, and material design. <nerd-digest> If you want to learn more about what I did, here is the gist and the code . </nerd-digest>. I really enjoyed creating the site, but it was time. The site was great. The only thing that was lacking was a good place to write the posts. I tried using many sites to write in markdown, but didn't find one that I really liked. I did like writing posts in markdown, maybe I can figure that out with blogger? Anyway, needless to say, I'm back on blogger :) Steam has a couple sales per year that are pretty epic with discounts. Two that I've found so far which I think are really good deals are Project Cars ...