As some of you may have noticed, I have been rather quiet over the last few months. There are a lot of reasons for my silence. The more observant among you may have even noticed that content has disappeared and reappeared from this site several times over the same time period. Long story short: The nature of this site and how and when I use it to express myself is changing. This change is long overdue.
For starters, I have been working on getting another job. After much soul searching and interviewing, I’m happy to announce that I will be returning to a former employer, Paylocity. I will start my new position there later this month. I finished my two week notice with Urban Electric yesterday and it was a very cordial departure, despite our deep differences of opinion when it comes to the subject of custom software development. They were and are truly wonderful people and I wish them nothing but the absolute best.
This website will still host my resume and updates that I want to share about my personal life. Nevertheless this is the last time I’ll be making a statement on this particular website regarding my professional career, outside of updating the resume. The time has come to segment some of my spicier takes from my actual professional identity. There is simply too much downside for me when it comes to running my mouth. Delving into the subjects I do in the honest and raw way I insist on doing it, especially in this day and age where every single word posted by somebody can be overanalyzed and misinterpreted in such a wide variety of ways, has probably cost me a lot over the years. At this point in my career I have no choice but to acknowledge that.
Some of the removed content has been restored. Some of it has been tweaked. What content is still missing shall never return. While I reserve the right to continue speaking on career related subjects and sharing my opinion, the venue for that will change. Most importantly, it will be separate and distinct from my actual professional identity.
This of course means that I’m losing my audience. If I draw you all a map to the new bat cave, it will no longer be a mystery and the venue only has inherent value precisely because it is a mystery. Maintaining proper op spec will of course also require me to speak less specifically about the details, but this is also a good thing. Everybody wins here.
In addition, I have decided to sunset the custom application driving this website, the Presentation Engine. I have worked on this application longer than any other project over the course of my life and I won’t lie: A huge part of me is going to miss it. But the reality is that my opinions on CMS related apps have changed rather drastically over the years. Which is to say that I’m not really a fan of them any longer. Though they can be convenient, the reality is that they create far more problems than most of us are willing to admit.
They are slower than static websites. They are more prone to security issues than static websites. They require more resources to operate than static websites. In case you haven’t picked up on the theme yet: I am going to move jaylittle.com over to a static website. I have opted to make use of Hugo to generate this new website. While it has been a learning curve, I’m happy to say that the vast majority of work required to get the new website online has already been done.
So why isn’t it live? Well it’s because I had a policy of prepaying Linode / Akamai (the provider who hosts the VM where this website lives) months ahead of time. Now that I want to leave, I don’t really have any way of getting that balance back except by making use of it. So that’s the plan. Once the balance runs out, that’s when the transition will occur. That balance will run out at the end of August so that is when this website will transition to its new static version.
Yes I could host the new website on Linode via object storage but in order to make that work, I gotta manually handle the SSL certs myself and frankly that’s a loser. LetsEncrypt or bust now. Besides that would still cost me money. So once this website transitions, it will also transition to being hosted on Github Pages as well. That service is free and SSL is handled there automatically via LetsEncrypt.
In any event, that’s all the news that is fit to print for now. Feel free to email with your thoughts and criticisms. After all, I wouldn’t have it any other way ;)