Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 / is on Nostr

 Early Internet/BBS Posse (86). Full stack Drupaler, almost competent server admin, marketing specialist for downtowns. Semi-pro Photographer.

TechCrunch Disrupt Alum. Non-24 (sighted). Wife has ME/CFS. Enjoyer of when the good news is also the bad news. Renown expert in absurdity.

Former: Physical Therapist, Hospital Design Analyst, CRM Admin, Boston U Alumni

NAFO Fella. Slava Ukraini. 🇺🇦

Photography: https://www.instagram.com/socialwavephotographer/
Location: South SF Bay Area
Pronouns: he/him

Last Notes

2024-08-18 12:37:08

I once posed as the business partner of a guy I had just met to pitch a major German corp for a project he wanted. He needed a dev & found me through a mutual.
He insisted that we pretend to be old pals. "I'm bad at lying" I tell him. "Let's rehearse a story."
"Don't worry. I'm German. They don't chit-chat."
I remain unconvinced. He immigrated but had been in the US so long that the only part of him still German was his accent.
No time to argue. We go in & spend 60 minutes bullshitting them to perfection. This deal is SO DONE. No personal questions as predicted!
Then as we start packing up, they pop the question.
My face: "Told you, asshole."
His face in reply: "Watch this." He launches into a 20 minute stream of consciousness word storm with no pauses. It began "America is the world's greatest social experiment" & rambled on about washing machine parts, places lived, Steve Wozniak, cars, food, toys, GUIs.
As soon as their eyes glaze over, he quickly excuses us and we get the hell out.
1/5
#freelance

2024-08-14 03:30:15

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I have a supervisor too. He’s quite the taskmaster and gets upset if I show up to work late.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/112/958/256/623/629/427/original/544a4581530512fd.jpeg

2024-07-31 05:57:33

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any mix tape I get input on will have something from the Jesus and Mary Chain on it.
I've learned over the years not to subject any of my fellow passengers to anything off of Psychocandy. 😂
...and so I'm putting April Skies from Darklands on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40PfRtZm_A0

2024-06-26 00:30:05

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could be a coincidence or not, but ours here in NorCal’s been pretty spotty for the past hour.

2024-06-21 12:37:00

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on a normal day, CloudFlare's main benefit is as a CDN. It just caches static stuff for you and saves you the bandwidth cost. On a bad day, CloudFlare's a firewall blocking traffic you don't want. I'm oversimplifying, but that's all that I care about most of the time.
Well, just sign up for an entry level VPS then. Is there anything stopping you from just picking the starter tier and going with it? I like VPSes mostly because they give you a lot more control over how the sites are served and finer control over provisioning. Also, it's nice to not have to login to 8 different control panels with 8 different interfaces when you can have just one big umbrella to sit under.
You'll also probably get access to some logs that you wouldn't otherwise be able to access too, but just because it's a VPS doesn't entirely get you out of the "all eggs in one basket" problem. A VPS at the end of the day is still a shared server. It's protected from most resource leakage, but there are exceptional circumstances.

2024-06-21 11:40:40

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with the caveat that I'm not able to dig into the architecture of this site, I'm not hearing anything that sounds like this is a site that's taxing and difficult to host. A vanilla WP site with a few thousand images isn't all that unusual. With the right caching setup, you might get bandwidth limited before you run out of memory or CPU.
(Way back in the day such a site would have left a mark, but probably not in 2024.)
What is it hosted on right now and what's your motivation to look at a VPS? Are you hitting any performance issues or are you just thinking of next steps so you have a solution when the need arises?
BTW, if you're concerned about bandwidth, take a peek at CloudFlare's free service levels. It's not hard to set up and CDNs for the most part require little configuration to get going. You CNAME your www to CloudFlare and then CNAME a special zone used by the CDN to grab assets from. You don't need to move those images. The CDN helps itself to what it thinks it needs.

2024-06-21 03:00:49

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oh so you're looking to spin up thousands of sites off a WP multi-site?

2024-06-21 02:48:41

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when you say graphics heavy, are those dynamic images that are generated on the fly or are are we just talking about a lot of assets that have to be downloaded to render the page?
If they're static assets or even if they're cached dynamic assets that don't get flushed often, you can go a long way.
If they're high traffic sites, you might want to start by picking a VPS plan with enough bandwidth allowance to accommodate the site. Vanilla WordPress sites don't need a lot of resources to run and the Digital Ocean droplets seem to start with 1 CPU and 512MB of RAM. That'll get you far with a well optimized WordPress site.

2024-06-21 02:36:09

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there's no way to do that based on any basic calculator or user count because the server load is highly dependent upon how the application is setup. If you've got an application that's highly cached, you can serve hundreds or even thousands of visitors an hour and not break a sweat. The opposite is true too. You can have 5 users an hour on a poorly optimized application and grind everything to a halt.
If you're just doing vanilla WordPress with a good caching plugin, you can go far on very little, but of course that's not how most people deploy WordPress and therein lies our issue with making any kind of resource generalization.
If you're building on WordPress and Symfony, I presume you've at least had some experience with managing hosting. What have you used before and was it enough? What sort of VPSes are you looking into? Most of the VPSes I'm thinking of are basically bonafide small servers, but I've also seen ones that are not much better than an ordinary virtual hosting container.

2024-06-19 13:54:37

There is an absolutely psychotic squirrel on a rampage in my backyard. It’s running in circles, doing donuts, and doing backflips nonstop. Any bird that lands anywhere near it is immediately chased off. It doesn’t want anything even touching this plot of dirt around this one tree.

2024-06-10 23:29:58

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Steve Jobs.
Legend has it that Steve Jobs thought slapping an upscaled iPhone calculator app onto the iPad looked ghetto so he wouldn't allow it.

2024-05-17 18:41:18

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it seemed so innocent at the time. 😩

2024-04-22 16:53:31

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correct. When trying to determine which side is up on a USB-A cable, the right answer is always the other side.

2024-04-22 05:19:31

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Current first world problem. Whenever I need a USB-C cable, I keep finding micro-USB cables. When I need a micro-USB cable, I keep grabbing the USB-C ones.

2024-04-22 03:34:33

Does anyone else get angry at their box of spare computer cables and power adapters?

2024-04-15 00:54:32

What's up with men and actually showing up when they agree to volunteer? Almost every woman who signs up to volunteer for things I'm coordinating has followed through. Hardly any men sign-up to begin with and even fewer show up.
Teenage boys don't have this problem. They're good for their word. It's just older men.
I hate to say this, but if I see a guy on my volunteer roster. I immediately put a question mark next to his name because I'm going to need an alternate lined up just in case.
#volunteering #men