Doug’s Blog

I’ve been a longtime UNIX user, from back at my days working at the Department of Defense, where there wasn’t an Internet — it was the ARPAnet and the only people on it were .GOV and .EDU folks. Man, those were the days! Fast pipes completely unclogged by spammers and the masses. Well, at least there is more content now.

I started on SunOS which is now Solaris, and back then the main UNIX competitor was DEC, which lost out since they tried to tie their software and hardware too close and would not interoperate with anyone. Ironically, that is what almost killed Apple in the 90’s.

I’ve used FreeBSD before Linux came out, and have used Gentoo for fun, and Fedora and RedHat Enterprise where it is more serious.

I’ve done coding in C, Java, Perl, and PHP for a while, and have done a lot of Perl for scripting and many other utility work. I’m a LAMP person, so unless the client REALLY wants to spend the extra money on an inferior Windows solution, it is all UNIX and open source solutions for my money.

On the frontend I’ve been working with Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, and Flex, and lately have been doing a lot of work in Flex2/3 and Actionscript. I used Flex to create the Flash Poker application we use at Ujogo, and I’ve also created other Facebook applications. I’ve gone through the FaceBook application process now a few times, and learning the ins-and-outs on it is not as simple as one may think since the documentation can be lacking in many areas.

I’ve been working with Amazon’s S3 and EC2 offerings, and find them to be helpful. I have some clients with servers on Amazon’s cloud now, it is a good solution in certain cases. Amazon also has a database service that is in Beta that I am testing.

I’ve also been working with Nirvanix on their Storage Delivery Network (SDN), they have a pretty robust solution that extends the basic API that most other SDNs offer.

Check out my links page for links I’ve collected that have been helpful in my development endeavors.