For a client I was asked today to run some of our software on S3/Cloudfront. Amazon released Cloudfront as beta a few days ago, but as this client is releasing a new, media rich, platform this week, it seemed only smart to at least test it out.
If Cloudfront wouldn’t work as expected for now (because of it’s beta status), we could always move to using S3 urls until the Cloudfront release.
Starting to use S3 from our own CDN (Infiniscale) seemed quite simple; I simply had to rewrite the file/directory drivers of our frame to support S3/Cloudfront. As I have no idea how to support direct authentication to Amazon urls (if that is even possible), I made a Cloudfront driver instead of an S3 driver, as the client is ok with full access to all files, no authentication.
As both programmer and marketer, I have been plagued with productivity issues all my life. I have the problems most people have, but I have them a bit worse; when I have to do something, I postpone it.
But I don’t just postpone it; I can tell my brain it is almost done, while it is not at all done. I go around telling people it is almost done and, as a consequence, work myself into a kind of pickle. A pickle which causes a lot of stress. Because you make expectations for people that cannot be met; they think you are almost done, while you have not even (or just) started.
Usually I get things done actually, in the end. And when the deadline is really pushing, I just work myself crazy and finish it.
With marketing stuff, this is not so bad; I just postpone it, get less visitors and/or less money. I can live with that; with programming it is bad, because programming jobs are underestimated anyway, the timeline to finish them is shifting rapidly and the urge to get them done diminishes while the urgency grows rapidly.
We all read the book by Ferris or people posting about working 4 hours a week. And we all would love to do that. Well, not all, and actually it is possible to really love your job in a way that it is also your hobby, but it should be possible to work 4 hours a week.
If it is possible to do this all depends on what you are doing and how much you are making. In the book Ferris is selling a popular product and when you see people online talking about doing this successfully they usually are selling something discrete and easy to outsource as well.
The most difficult thing, for me is the outsourcing of my work.
This question is often asked on internet marketing, web master and other forums. In fact, almost every time you present a new product a new product, a bunch of people post replies asking this exact question.
It is quite a logical thing to ask, because if you can get something for free which is identical to the product you offer, it would not make much sense in offering it for money, right? Well, not exactly.
I know a lot about offering stuff for free; I admin and run huge free hosting sites, file sharing sites and image sharing sites. The market for such sites is incredibly hard right now; ad spendings are down, hosters are getting strict with their policies and hosting costs, in most free giveaway markets, are always rising.
Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) is one of my favorite gurus. The guy has charisma, vision and is very smart. He was, on many occasions ahead of his time and it proved to be very lucrative on all (as far as I know) of them.
Having said that, I must say I’m an avid hardware and hosting freak. I run more than 200 servers in different locations around the world and a lot of those servers I built with my bare hands (yep, I risk the static electricity stuff; you don’t look quite so cool putting in dimms with a little bracelet on; never went wrong so far. knock-on-wood).
I run mostly Debian on my systems (Etch or Sarge) and it usually runs fine. We don’t have many hardware breakdowns (buy expensive hardware; it really is better) and be nice to your systems; don’t overload them, use monitoring etc. Problem is, small sites sometimes grow big and then the scaling thing starts. Although we don’t sell cheap hosting accounts, we don’t have resources to buy SANs, solid hardware load balancers etc. We do everything with open source software and it works, mostly.
When you are a hardworking individual, paying for your own servers, tweaking your sites etc to make ends meet, it is really frustrating seeing people abuse your hard work.
Although you take basic measures to prevent hackers from misusing your site in a lot of ways, they always find new and faster ways to get on top. The easier your site is to use for real users, the easier it is for spammers to get in.
What drives these people? Do they tell their parents; ‘look ma, pa, I have a cool job, I f*ck people over and make a few cents with it for some unethical person on the other side of the world!’? Or do they keep it quiet and no-one, not even their spouses know about their profession?
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