The concept for my blog reflects a big theme in my work ethic, working smarter not harder. Let me say that again, WORK SMARTER, not harder! The best way to accomplish that is to build tools. Poor programmers complain about their tools, good ones build tools to do the work for them. Since I am a problem solver / tool builder by nature, the term MetaSkills, a play on meta programming, seemed to best describe me in a singular cohesive action moniker. If you want to find out more about me professionally, you can read my resume.
My History
Long before I became a full time software engineer, my career had started in the world of advertising. That story started in ninth grade when I submitted a report in history class that got an A+ simple for the fact that it was presented well. I did have an advantage beyond my personal World Book Encyclopedias as I was probably the first kid in 1986 to wield a $5,000 laser printer and personal publishing system from home. I also worked at a local print shop and my Mac Plus consistently outperformed the Xerox 6085 Workstations I worked on. That's right, at the age of 14 I was being paid as a Desktop Publishing computer operator. Back then, a 10 megabyte hard drive was elite and the fastest way to rotate text was to stand on your head. My have the times changed. To learn more about my job history, go check out my resume. Sorry, you will not find the print shop nor my paper route on there :)
How Has This Happened ?
That's a great question and I'm glad your reading on. I did say that I was a Mac addict did I not? Maybe you picked up on that. Well I am and here on this website I am taken Macs out of their normal piegonholed category as being used for the creative industry and graphic artists and into the world of serious IT using the power locked behind the Mac OS X operating system. By example even this website, including its databases, DNS, and mail services are all hosted on an average Mac that anyone can buy at the local computer store. I am specifically speaking about the Mac Mini.
Macs are what I called canned LINUX/UNIX and they can do so much once you decide to get under the hood and tinker around behind the graphical user interface, where the real power lies. On my blog I want to cover as much about these fun places. Here is a growing list on the topic:
- Mini Network with a Big XServe Style
- How To Control Browser Caching with Apache 2
- Getting On Good Terms With The OS X Shell
- My Own Soup to Nuts Recipe for Ruby on RAILS on OS X
- Flying Light - Configuring Drupal and LightTPD
- MetaSkills.net Reborn on Mephisto
- Now on Passenger (mod_rails)
The data diagram below is a bit outdated but was the starting point of my home mac mini cluster.
