Tips and Tricks

SoftLayer Mobile Team is part of the Interface Development group that is dedicated to providing access to SoftLayer global platform. Our goal is to bring an outstanding user experience by clear presentation of data and friendly navigation through resources right in the palms of our customers.

If you’re a developer, you know the feeling of a constant infatuation with learning new methods, strategies and languages. Earlier this year, I posted an introduction to HTML5 via game programming and I thought to myself, "There has to be a more practical use for this in my daily work". Thus my research began.

When searching for new jQuery plugins, I tend to spend hours, if not days sifting through options and comparing the pros and cons of each plugin. During one such research binge a particular plugin caught my eye.

If you’ve read my previous blogs, you know that I tend to focus on very user-friendly tips and tricks, small tidbits that make the browsing experience more appealing to the end users. Nowadays, if you don’t spruce up your content and make it look like a million bucks, you’ll lose your users’ interest. They say you have less than eight seconds to make an impression!

Sometimes I just can't be bothered to do things in the "normal" way. Now, I can enjoy a good ole zen activity like the occasional manual data entry, but in general if I have to repeat a task more than a few times I get antsy. And I am not completely unsure that someone smart and sucessful said something good about lazy people. So in my quest for maximum return for minimal effort I find myself collecting various useful snippets and scripts. Today we will go through one in my collection.

Most websites today are built with a community mindset, where the target audience is you.

Belonging to several community sites as a member I have dozens of logins to remember but I've also made building community websites my career. So it’s important for me to not only participate but to observe: what makes a successful community?

Automate, automate, automate...

Automation is part of our SoftLayer DNA. We automate not only our external processes and procedures, such as server provisioning and operating system reloads, but also internal processes such as our iOS mobile products testing.

Backups are dandy; especially when you delete everything by accident. But when some joker writes a backup script that you think will be helpful and doesn’t document how to use it properly, it’s probably more frustrating than figuring things out yourself. We’ve been busy launching a private cloud offering so this blog is much overdue.

Need to OS Reload many servers you say!?!

Do you have a large number of servers whom could use fresh start? A 1/2 dozen boxes which can now be re-purposed? Maybe want to upgrade to the latest version of Debian and just couldn't be bothered with apt?

What ever the series of events which have led to this moment, you now find yourself in need of a way to submit a seemingly limitless number of OS Reloads and the threat of carpel tunnel makes you weary of accomplishing this task the old(or would that be new) fashioned way.

TL;DR: I deleted my personal site, restored it, and wrote an awesome rsync-like backup script that's really fast and easy on IO. Github link at the end of the article.

Time is the only true bartering resource. We trade dollars for goods or services but the hard earned currency for the transaction is one's time for another's. Due to the nonrenewable nature of this resource it is oft difficult for spare hours to be put into learning or researching that topic you always had a passing interest in or that everyone is gushing over. I try and keep an eye out during my daily experience for situations which may provide the excuse I need to allot time to one of the items on my "when-time-allows" list. On my list for some time: Python.