My Perfect Job It was early 2006, and I had what most people would consider a perfect job. I worked as a Developer Platform Evangelist for Microsoft Corporation, delivering labs worldwide to Microsoft Partners and teaching how to migrate applications to 64-bit computing. I was working as a contractor, commonly called a v-(dash) in the Redmond/Bellevue corporate lingo. My life was great, and it was also great for my main employer. “Rent-a-geek” as I call it, is very profitable given the right customer, and we always delivered to Microsoft on time and on budget. One week, I was in Silicon Valley, then London, India, Seattle, Sweden, Boston, the Netherlands, Korea, Building 20 (the old main campus training center), and the list goes on. If you are curious, you can take a glimpse of my globetrotting in my post, Road Warrior. The usual joke with my fellow trainers was, “What continent are we in today?” We lived in an eternal state of jet lag, but who doesn’t want to travel the world, all expenses paid, while doing something you love? It was the perfect job. Then I quit my job to go headfirst into entrepreneurship. I failed. And it was the best […]
You only have 24 hours a day…1,440 minutes…86,400 seconds. At first glance, this may seem like a lot. But it is not. There is a very limited supply of time, and it can be your friend or your enemy. And you get to choose if you are in control of your time, or if you let others control it. That is why you need to Protect Your Productive Time. But why? Why do you need to protect your time? And how do you do it? Let me tell you. I am a .NET developer who is very passionate about enterprise search, primarily with Apache Solr. And this is great because I’ve spent the last few months of my life building the search API library for one of the Big Four auditing firms. It is a huge project, with hundreds of developers, and my library is only a very small piece in comparison to the rest, but it is a very important piece none-the-less. And while working here, one of the things that I’ve noticed is how programmers have a tendency to give estimates that are not too accurate. Why does this seem to be a recurring issue? Well, there are the […]
SolrNet, the C# client for Apache Solr, has a new release: 0.5.1. The current release aims to include a breaking change with the latest versions of Solr 4.x in which multiple collations are returned by Solr. I am currently working on getting it to Nuget.
The other day I needed to finish a task I had in one of my servers and needed to remote into one of my Cloudera QuickStart VMs to run a test while on a trip. So I installed TeamViewer to access it. Steps are simple: # Click on Download TeamViewer link for RedHat, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE to get the rpm package from the downloads page https://www.teamviewer.com/en/download/linux/ Open terminal and go to downloads directory sudo yum localinstall teamviewer_12.0.71510.i686.rpm And then start with teamviewer
In my Pluralsight trainings, Getting Started with Enterprise Search using Apache Solr and Implementing Search in .NET Applications, one of the things that I make quite a bit of emphasis is on how important search is, yet it is one of the most misunderstood functions of IT and development in general. In this post I will show you an example of how a potentially good app is a pretty bad app mainly because of its search capabilities. It is so much the case that in Twitter Pluralsight selected this phrase to tweet about the release of my course as you can see here: But now let’s get to the sample. Here’s the scenario: Problem: Life is busy. No time to go to the supermarket Solution: use your grocery store’s web site to purchase your food and it gets delivered home the next day. Charming idea, did not work with Webvan, but it seems to be doing quite well for Amazon and in my home town one of the major supermarkets is doing it in a more controlled way with a good delivery service, all for $10. Not too scalable, but for a MVP it is ok. (Read Lean Startup if you […]
Something that really annoys me, especially when connecting remotely is how the terminal blanks when installing Cloudera Manager in Linx CentOS Well, there is a very simple fix, simply run the following command and the terminal will not go black sudo setterm -blank 0
Look around you. Look closer. Pay more attention. What do you see? When I look around me I can see activity trackers, digital cameras, smart watches, interconnected devices, virtual reality gadgets, wearable technology, smart elevators, energy saving light systems, intelligent traffic lights, smart cars with over the air updates and that can gather data on your driving habits, intelligent houses, eco friendly buildings and more. All of these generate massive amounts of data. But let’s hold that thought for a minute. Now this is just what’s happening around you. What do you have in your pocket or in your hand right now? Most likely a smart phone. It is your portal to the digital world and even though it became second nature – pretty much everyone walks around with a phone in their hand now a days – it is a relatively new phenonem. It is highly likely that you use your smartphone constantly to check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or search the web using Google among a few other applications. This generates humongous amounts of data. Let’s throw out a few numbers just to put it in perspective. Facebook has 1.6 billion users- yes, that is with a B – […]
