Earthlink To Amazon

When I started college I didn't yet have a website. In all fairness it was 1997. My introduction to Unix was reading email using Pine at Presbyterian College. I was interested in writing and the most free-form outlet for my craft appeared to be the Presbyterian College Net Publication (PCNP). I wrote articles on Nunavut and Genealogy among other things. We called our server Frankenstein and had it hooked up to an old dot matrix printer we'd scrounged up. I ended up becoming editor before I left (for the wholy unrelated lack of physics class offerings due to an accident one of the professors had) and spent the summer in front of a monitor on the command line. I had personal space on the PCNP site, but I didn't really think of it as MY webpage

In 1998 my first quarter at GA Tech I took the intro to computing class where we set up our own personal websites in the lab. It was the genesis of this site, my own webpage. Actually it was several pages and we even learned advanced topics like frames and cascading style sheets (CSS). At the time it was generally advised to turn off Javascript in your browser for security reasons (it was usually a source of viruses) and PHP was still in it's infancy. So we wrote in good old HTML as Tim Berners-Lee had intended. The pages themselves were for storing information, rather than a database, linking them together was the magic of the web. For years afterward the lab manual was my main webprogramming reference. It was really programming anyway - that was done in languages like Java, C or C++. I spent a little time there as a CS major, but eventually ended up going another route on the conviction that there was a glut of programmers in the market and much of the profession would soon be outsourced to India. This was in part motivated by the summer job I had programming warehousing software in Java for Manhattan Associates. They laid off 10% of their workforce while I was there. Leaving GA Tech I purchased the Wogsland.org domain and moved my personal website from http://gatech.edu/~gte017k to Mindspring's webhosting.

In grad school for physics we used webpages to store and link data. After all, that's what physicists at CERN invented the HTML and the web for: sharing and connecting information. In High Energy Physics (HEP) I encountered what I'd feared would happen as a programmer. BaBar, the experiment I worked on at SLAC, was one of the last big HEP experiments in the US. There aren't any running today. At SLAC I did most of my programming in PERL and ROOT (C++), but there was a lot more math and soldering. My webpage grew quite a bit during this period, as I started blogging and organizing all of the physics research on the subjects which concerned me. If you Google "Cherenkov Detectors", for example, my site still comes up in the first page of results. Living in California I also became interested in oenology and built a wine rating website using PERL to process an Excel spreadsheet into static HTML documents. By then Earthlink had purchased Mindspring and I setup the site there.

Leaving physics I focused on my skills analyzing data, assuming they were the most valuable. I did statistical analysis on some huge demographic datasets at Experian and then built the claim valuation model that formed the backbone of PatientFocus's operations after a daliance in the actuarial world. At Experian I also did my first real work in PHP, building an interface to Twitter's API that allowed for automated marketing to users who tweeted certain keywords. Old hat now, but fairly cutting edge in 2009. It was at PatientFocus though that I encountered the modern world of web programming: a scripting language building webpage HTML in real time pulling data from a database with Javscript to animate and pull more data as needed via AJAX calls. Building webpages that involved REAL programming!

When I decided it was time to move on from PatientFocus I marketed my programming skills because there was a dearth rather than a glut in the market. My experience with PHP, it turns out, is more valuable than the ability to build acturate mathematical models of business processes. While Earthlink was great for hosting HTML documents, they're not really set up for web programming. They don't allow git on their servers. I had no control over Apache so I can't set up any virtual hosts (i.e. I couldn't set up bradley.wogsland.org, where you're reading this blog). Their MySQL databases had to be accessed through their web interface. For these reasons, as well as the cost savings, I'm transfering things over to Amazon. Alora is also super excited. We have all the control we need: updating PHP, git versioning, virtual hosts, basically anything I could do if I bought a physical Linux server and set it up in my house.

Excelsior!