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I never finish anyth

greig.cc

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Re: I never finish anyth

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - You realise that you are not sure how to deploy this on production. My advice for this is don't worry about it. Just hand install on a cheap shared web hosting place and manually copy stuff across to get it up and running. When that gets too annoying, start automating. When your home grown automation scripts get long and unwieldy, look into Capistrano or Puppet (or Chef, or Ansible). The important thing is: make…

Except the first one, thanks a lot for looking at the bright side of things and the advises! but.. How can i not worry about deployment? What happens after people trusting and starts using my 'lets say' web app and after 2 weeks i get my database hacked? Companies have TechOps department just for deploying the applications correctly. I am not trying to argue but trying to explain how i think of this :) Maybe i am bei…

Again, I wouldn't worry too much about getting hacked. Don't use bad or obvious passwords on your db or ssh account. Besides I would say much of the hacking surface is going to be in your site's code, if it's in any way dynamic.

You'll probably make mistakes. The biggest actual devops advice I can give is backup. Everything. Often enough so that if you lose everything since your last backup you can live with it. And again, it doesn't even have to be automated. Run mysqldump by hand and save the results away somewhere. Rsync your home directory away. If you have a dedicated server, rsync /etc, too.

Having a backup is the solution to almost any catastrophic event in the devops world. Disk crash? Get a new disk, restore from backup, continue on. Hacked? Figure out how, fix security hole in code (or wherever), wipe server, change passwords, restore from backup, continue. I'm sure there are more.

Having done devops work, most of the hard part is getting it to all run smoothly and automatically (big web sites have many many servers and slave dbs, and deploying to them all becomes complicated). But as a single person working on a small project, that's not the most important thing to optimize for, in my opinion. It's more important to get it done.

Re: I never finish anyth

#103
Something REALLY has to pique my interest for me to get into the flow state and once I'm there I have a go at it like no one will; and once I'm out of that state, its really hard to go back into it unless something picks me back up. What I discovered is:

1) Break down your project into bits that excite you all the way through and imagine being excited while you're planning it. Have someone else be there with you with to plan this with you while you do it - helps with the planning. This chunking of the project itself is the battle. You beat this and you've conquered most of the problem.

2) Work on two - three manageable projects at the same time. This usually has worked for me my entire life. Alternate between them. When you get bored with one, pick the other one up and plan all of them out so you have interesting bits chunked out throughout.

3) Always work with high-energy individuals who would keep the energy up throughout the project. When you feel tired or bored, they will find a way to pick you back up again.

4) Always find projects that YOU can find some value in YOUR life.

Re: I never finish anyth

#105

I've finished something before. It pays back somehow. But now I barely working on anything. I admit I don't like any work at all. Working for Google or SpaceX? No. I think we want to finish something because we are not satisfied with our current life. If you feel your current status is okay, it's not easy to get motived to put yourself into some extra work.

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Re: I never finish anyth

#107

For me gamification works. I'm a sucker for the stats Github can display for a project. And keeping that streak going. I've started to throw all my embarrasing, childish project onto github. If someone files a comment regarding how bad something is - great, then I have something concrete to fix. And having a lot of projects open means there is always something easy to fix to keep the streak going. Suddenly projects m…

I did that for my Open Source stuff, I stopped at 164 days streaking. Maybe I should take that up for private projects.
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