moving blog site

Okay I give up. I’ve tried to love godaddy, tried to work with managing wordpress but by God, it is the most unstable piece of shit software I’ve ever come across. Every time you upgrade a plugin, it blows up in your face and you spend hours trying to figure out what on earth went wrong. How on earth the guys here at wordpress.com do it is a miracle.

But so, here we are! We’re now on wordpress, with limited customisability traded for piece of mind. Now I can instead focus on writing (in my head) interesting conversations as opposed to debugging this POS software.

and I guess …
Hello World again!

p/s: actually I’m also thinking about playing with AWS but I think I’ll keep those credits for actually software goodness. I’ve lost all faith in this thing called wordpress

a few things I learned this week

Choosing where to host your blog is an art

A better way to put than “pain in the ass”, I am getting really annoyed at the performance of GoDaddy and their services in general. A simple reverse IP lookup indicated I have a thousand sites hosted on the same machine as mine. Never mind security hell-hole, the performance is horrendous.

So I’m currently trial-ling out wordpress.com (hosting the identical blog on takaloy.wordpress.com). Turns out, whilst it’s initially free and I don’t really mind paying for that £85 p/annum ~ there’s still a host of hidden costs involved. Want a custom domain? cough up mate. Want to customise something? money. You want storage? money. You want a cake but don’t want to eat it? no can’t do mate you will have neither! It also doesn’t scale well cost wise. On the plus side, it has definitely a better word processor than the one that comes bundled with wordpress.

The geekiest of the alternatives is hosting on AWS, taking advantage of the free-tier. It involves quite a bit of pain learning my way around Linux and how to install / host PHP ~ all of it. Definitely the most tempting option, but simply too much work right now. I might eventually go down this route but I really want to maximise my gain on the free-tier so I’ll leave investigating that for later.

Meanwhile, I’ve updated the theme of the blog again, in my quest to find the perfect expression of “me”. But not there yet!

 

Entity Framework and SQLite are not best of friends

The good news is that I found overall Entity Framework’s code first approach really reduces development time massively. The bad news is that most of that advantage disappears the minute you choose SQLite as your development database. Though, to be fair ~ Dapper also takes a lot of work when it comes to developing a prototype from scratch. The final reason for picking Dapper was that the benefits of EF were so minimal the 50 times performance will really show in the long run.

 

Never take drugs, except when labelled Resharper

It really wasn’t until late 2013 that my previous company decided to splash some cash on Resharper. Even then, our development machines were horrendous that resharper basically brings the machine to a crawl; we ended up disabling it half the time. Fast forward 2015, I’m now working at a new company with blazing fast laptop and resharper, dotcover and everything runs without a glitch; hence my new addiction. My addiction to it has gone so bad that I can no longer function (properly) without it, and I’ve even bought one just for my home personal use today (really sad … I wonder if I can go off and do some freelance work and claim it off as expense?) .