“A little House well fill’d, a little Field well till’d, and a little Wife well will’d, are great Riches.”

“Necessity never made a good bargain.”

“Keep thy shop, & thy shop will keep thee.”

“Humility makes great men twice honourable.”

“It is better to take many Injuries than to give one.”

“One Mend-fault is worth two Findfaults, but one Findfault is better than two Makefaults.”

“If you know how to spend less than you get, you have the Philosophers-Stone.”

“He that lives well, is learned enough.”

“He that would live in peace & at ease, Must not speak all he knows, nor judge all he sees.”

No related posts.

The name came from something in his family. I think his grandfather, but I’m not sure. If asked how much money he made, he’d answer “buck two-eighty.” If asked again, he’d answer “thirty-seven fifty.”

I’ve turned that over in my head over and over, and it’s made income into an abstract concept for me. I guess I should be more specific, it’s made revenue an abstract concept. Revenue means nothing, except in contrast to expenses.

My goal is to reduce expenses. You become so much more competitive in the marketplace if you can enter with low expenses. You can call the shots on so many things. It makes life so much better.

A year from now, I expect to have expenses down 25%. That will be huge. I’ll be able to write my ticket.

No related posts.

In Org-mode, I select a region I wish to spellcheck by going to the heading and keying ‘C-c @’. Then, the command for spellchecking an active region is ‘M-x ispell’.

That launches you into an efficient check and replace process from the start of your selected region to the end.

I’m becoming a bit of an oddball, I think. I prefer VIM for writing code, but for writing text and for organization, I prefer Emacs. Org-mode is awesome. You should check it out.

No related posts.

Another tool similar to Puppet is Chef. From what I can tell, both are equally well regarded. I will be using Chef at work, so I’m playing with Puppet at home for now so I can get an introduction to both tools.

Having had lots of experience supporting various sites and applications, it’s really fun to start using a tool that would drastically make that job easier. There’s always a desire to go back and do something you’ve done in the past, but to do it better with the benefit of one’s experience. If I were to start an IT operation from scratch, either Chef or Puppet would be a central part of my strategy.

Also, a note — I’ve gotten to the point in my life when a great Friday night is one spent at home, up late, playing with stuff on the computer. No apologies for that!

No related posts.

I started with the online documentation for AWS:

http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/index.html?SettingUp_CommandLine.html

I found it’s pretty easy to do. Once you install the Amazon command line tools and get your environment variables set up, it’s pretty simple to start and stop your instances. Here’s a quick and dirty shell script I wrote:


#!/bin/bash

case $1 in
start)
ec_suite_start
;;
stop)
ec_suite_stop
;;
*)
echo "Usage: control.sh {start|stop}"
;;
esac


Next up, I’m going to try to launch and configure a web server with Chef. Exciting!

Related posts:

• Downloading Magento Connect Extensions from the command line
• Job control in Linux – the "disown" command

Here’s a screencast I just watched on building a load balanced LAMP stack on EC2 with Chef (courtesy Opscode).

No related posts.

The year began with an exciting new contract position at Best Buy, and things were looking up. I was busy through the spring and took on additional clients, working in the evenings and weekends. My job at Best Buy continued to go well, and in July they offered me a permanent position as a Senior Lead Developer. After careful consideration, I accepted the offer, and began the process of winding down my fledgling consulting business.

This fall I wrapped up my final work as an independent contractor and I am now putting 100% of my efforts toward my job at Best Buy, which has changed from Senior Lead Developer to Web Development Manager. I’m excited about the work that needs to be done in the year ahead.

When I’m not spending time with my wonderful wife and son I’m working on preparing my old house to become a rental property in South Minneapolis. My goal is to have that rented out in April or May.

Beyond that, I’m always coming up with ideas, as usual. I’ll take one thing at a time, and I have no plans to quit my day job, but who knows what the future holds.

No related posts.

I always hear a message in between the lines of that song, that life is better as a farmer. The work is just as hard, but you have the sun on your shoulders, and the fields yield back year after year. The gains come slowly, but after years of work, you have fertile fields to pass down to another generation, which will continue to yield for years to come.

I found the same analogy the other day in this article on creating a software company. It seems the author shares the same philosophy that I do.

Tech startups have become a fetish. It could be seen at this year’s South by Southwest Festival. They had a bus that went from California to Austin, and it was filled with young techies challenged to create the next startup in the course of the trip.

There’s less emphasis paid these days on building a business that will last. In my opinion, that’s the measure of the quality of anything — how long will it last? Whether it’s a building, a bridge, software, or a business, the test of time reveals the measure of its value.

That’s the vision for EK Mitchell, LLC. To go to work each day, and do the little things right. To always leave a fertile field after every harvest. With hard work, I’ll add to my acreage, and increase my yield modestly year after year. A services business is no get rich quick scheme.

No, the reward is in the work. If you enjoy what you do, you never have to retire. And the fields will give back to you year after year.

No related posts.

If you want to get these emails as they come out, please email me at erik -at- ekmitchell.com and I’ll add you to the list.

Here’s the text of yesterday’s email:

Hello Friends and Family!
Welcome to my first newsletter! I’m going to be sending an email out
about once a month. You’re on this list because I thought you might
want to be.

If you’d rather not get these emails, just hit reply and tell me to
take you off the list, and I’ll take care of it right away!

Ok, are you still with me? Great!

In this issue, I’ll tell you about my company, I’ll give you an update
on what I’m doing at Best Buy, I’ll tell you about the mobile
development I’m working on, and finally about a great community event
that I was able to be a part of.

So, about my company: EK Mitchell, LLC is a web and mobile software
development company, which I founded in 2002. In the early days, I
worked as a freelance web developer. At the end of 2003, I got a great
job and put the company on the back burner, doing a little freelance
work here and there in the years that followed.

But I always wanted to give it another go, and in 2010, I made the
leap to become an independent contractor, signing up to work full time
for Best Buy Co. Inc. (more about that later). This time around I’m
laying the groundwork for a web and mobile software company that
leverages my experience, my technical ability, and my commitment to
customer service.

In the next year I hope to build EK Mitchell, LLC into a seaworthy
vessel, and set forth on the adventure of entrepreneurship. I hope to
bring other talented people in to join me, and I hope you’ll follow
along as I tell the story.

- What’s going on at Best Buy?
I was brought into Best Buy to work on its “Local Store Pages” site,
which you can visit at http://stores.bestbuy.com/5/ (that’s the Edina
store, where I got my 3rd computer!). In cooperation with the Local
Store Page business team, I helped resolve technical issues and add
important features through the end of FY11, which ended February.

This site runs on WordPress, which is a great piece of software for
powering all kinds of websites. WordPress powers millions of websites
on the Internet. Best Buy’s implementation of WordPress is such a big
deal that it’s featured on WordPress.org:
http://wordpress.org/showcase/best-buy/.

Since March 1 I’ve been working on a new project at Best Buy, which
I’ll tell you more about in the months ahead!

- And the Mobile Development thing I mentioned?
In March I was able to take a 2 day course in iPhone application
development, taught by Dan Grigsby of Drivetrain
(http://drivetrainagency.com/). It was a great intro into the world of
mobile development and I’m excited to be entering this new space as a
developer.

And I already have a project to work on! In collaboration with Nate
Mueller (http://www.nate-mueller.com/), I’m developing an iPhone app!
Look for more on that in future newsletters.

- How about Community Involvement?
Last weekend I participated in the Nerdery Overnight Web Challenge
(http://tc2011.overnightwebsitechallenge.com/), where 18 teams of web
pros came together to crank out 18 websites for 18 deserving
non-profits in 24 hours. My team built a brand new website for
Someplace Safe, a women’s crisis center in western Minnesota. The site
looks awesome, and I’ll have a link in next month’s newsletter for
everyone to see.

- In Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Next month I’ll have more to
talk about with Best Buy, including a project I did that solved a
nasty problem and brought a huge return on investment. I’ll update you
on mobile development, and also point you to the new website from the
Overnight Web Challenge.

Until then, have a great April!

These are planned for the first Friday of every month. If you want to follow along, let me know!

Related posts:

• Safely upgrading WordPress with diff and patch

If you think you might go, please choose the Buffalo Wild Wings location that is most preferable to you. We’ll go to the highest voted location. I’m proposing that we meet on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011.

The poll should be visible in the right hand sidebar, immediately to the right of this text. Please only vote once!

No related posts.