Starting over

I’ve been absent here for a long time, for lots of reasons, which I’ll expand on in the next few posts.

For starters, I’ve recently left my second job at AWS, and unfortunately without any of the great memories of sense of regret that I had the first time. A lesson that even a great company has pockets that are horrible, and that not every role will work for everybody, even if you’ve been successful in a similar role elsewhere in the organization. Also, your manger matters more than anything and you need to choose carefully. If you don’t have a strong good vibe from minute one, say no.

Second, this website has been broken and unusable for way too long. The infrastructure behind it was creaky, the database had been messed up by some previously-used plugin, and the theme I was using no longer was receiving support and in fact prevented me from upgrading to a current and supported php version. I was able to post, but not to upload images or do much else. It needed to be moved to new current infrastructure, to have the core WordPress software updated, the database re-built, and a new theme/design selected. I’ve now done the first three and have settled on at least a temporary theme that does the job. Tweaks to the design are sure to come.

In the coming weeks I’ll be writing up everything I learned while dropping deep into “click-ops” to build out my new AWS-based WordPress environment, and everything I would do differently next time. Then I’ll be writing some long-overdue commentary on the state of tech, the cloud, learnings from the past two years of my work experiences, etc.