Shawn on the net

I’ve been working a lot with GoGrid lately as we needed some west coast servers and Amazon doesn’t offer US-west yet.  Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by Amazons offering but I’ve found GoGrid to be almost unusable for day to day work.  A few of the issues so far.

1. OS images – They only offer centos/RHEL for the linux side which I am not comfortable with plus I hate yum so I end up spending large amounts of time fighting the system to configure new servers

2. Load balancer – You get a free load balancer which is awesome! What they don’t tell you is that they are not configurable.  Add a new server to your cluster?  You need to delete the load balancer and recreate it which of course means downtime.  Like 10-15 minutes of downtime everytime you want to add a new server.  Thats just not acceptable.  Even support can’t change this for you when you call up.

3. No stored images – If you customize your servers quite heavily you will be heartbroken to find out that you cant store that image to use on new servers.  No instead on your next server you’ll have to do it all again so write it down.

4. no upgradeability – If you start with say 1 or 2gig servers and realize after a while that you need to upgrade them you can’t.  I spoke to support about this as well and was told to create a new server and delete the old one.  Thats fine if you can use the default image but I can’t so that means 1-2 hours wasted for each server I have to change plus see issue 2 I’ll have to have 10-15 minutes of downtime when I replace the load balancer.

I’ve been working a lot of cloud environments lately including 20 boxes on Amazon EC2, and 4 on GoGrid. I’m looking at Mosso this week.  Once done I’ll post a round up of them all.

I applied to be an Azoogle publisher this week.  For those that haven’t read my introduction I use to be an AzoogleAds developer.  Unfortunately I don’t know anyone in publisher management anymore so I can’t pull any strings to get approved faster and with my traveling around Australia at the moment approval could be a problem.

Wish me luck.

Welcome to Shawn on the net.  What follows is my bio and details about what I plan to do here.  It’s probably not of interest to anyone but I want to put it some where so here it is.

I’m Shawn O’Neill a software developer/code monkey from Toronto, Canada.  I started my career at CGEY in England in 2001 working as a C developer for a pretty big(17 million members at the time) customer loyalty system.  After doing that for a few years I left CGEY and started my own company.  By this time most of my personal development was done in PHP and I had started writing a social networking site for companies that would allow them to leverage employee relationships to assist in sales.  I was also doing consulting and the time and landed a pretty nice gig with Virgin Trains fixing up their station issue tracking system.

Eventually I decided to move back home to Toronto and so off I went.  I landed a job with Keane Canada and Morgan Stanley working on their ETL and distributed testing teams which was ok for learning but otherwise uninteresting as I was told I was being hired to program and I ended up doing server support 100% of the time.  But I did learn a few things about databases so I’m thankful for that.

Around the same time I was launching an online community for models, photographers, and makeup artists with someone else called YourNextX.com.  I did all the development on the first two versions after which it was taken over by another two companies.  That site caused a lot of stress in my life.  I never liked the deal to transfer ownership but was forced into it.  In the end the new companies ran the site into the ground, and one of them made some pretty shady deals on the side while trying to cut us out of the profits.  We eventually got control of the site back but by then it was too far gone and my partner and I couldn’t agree on a future for it so it was wound down.

After I left Keane/MS I started working for AzoogleAds(now EpicAds) which is one of the worlds largest affiliate networks.  The team was all around my age which was new for me (in the past almost all my co-workers were at least 15-20 years older than me) and I had a blast.  I was working in PHP and we always had lots of interesting things to do and great people to do them with.  I worked for Azoogle up to the start of 2008.

After Azoogle I went to work with Evolvenetworks which was developing a dating site called LoveIsSexy.com.  The tech director was my former team lead from Azoogle and a few other developers from there were joining me so it was an exciting time.  The work was fun and interesting and I got to spend a lot of time improving on the scaling and optimization skills I’d developed working for AzoogleAds.  My co-workers were a blast too and were all very talented.  3 months or so after starting my girlfriend and I decided we wanted to take some time to travel.  We settled on Australia and as summer began in Canada and as soon as she finished teachers college we were Australia bound.

Before I left I founded SiteThree Studios Inc with a good friend and business partner in Toronto.  We have big plans for a few projects that should hopefully be out by the end of 2008.

That pretty much sums it up.  As for this site, I’m just going to use it to post what I’m currently doing development wise, and projects I’m working on, books I’m reading etc.  It probably won’t be interesting to anyone but if it is let me know.

P.S. If you want to read about my time in Australia and traveling check out http://shawnsandtawns.com