When we decide to make our big move to the cloud, we learned… a lot. We learned all sorts of things about options, settings, security and not-custom infrastructure things. Quite a bit of this is good to know, and best practices, but some was just a fact of moving as we did. This is part 2 of moving to the […]

Recently I’ve been working on implementing logging in a new application. Logging is a common feature we find ourselves constantly implementing. I hope were not implementing it from scratch. There are a number of logging libraries, especially in Dot Net, that handle just about any logging need you can think of. This time, rather than write software that is directly […]

We’re soft-announcing a new thing for the virtual conference (sounds so official, yes? “a new thing”). It’s our incubator series. What it comes down to is a free booth for new startup type companies. The idea is that we really want to support the growing community of developers, companies, new companies and such – those that are just getting started […]

So far, I’ve been talking mostly about the good that has come out of our move to the cloud for hosting and services on SSWUG.ORG (and vConferenceOnline.com). But of course there have been some lessons learned too. Along the way, we’ve learned quite a bit about how to, and perhaps not to, do things in the cloud. Here are a […]

In my opinion, the greatest value of the Internet of Things (IOT) is the ability to capture actionable data. Here’s a simple example. A refrigerator manufacturer produces an internet aware refrigerator. As the owner of the refrigerator is using products they keep cool inside, they find they need to replenish something. They can tell the refrigerator to re-order from their […]

We have had a large assortment of learnings from the move to fully-hosted services. Yesterday’s post talked about these a litlle, and I wanted to expand on that a bit with some additional things that have gone really well in our transition. Better Accessibility to Updates Perhaps one of the most evident changes as we’ve moved to a more managed […]

What makes one hedge fund more profitable than another? Knowledge. A person who knows information that can impact the value of a traded asset prior to other consumers can purchase or sell those assets at a time to make the most profit. They call this the Edge. There are degrees of the Edge. They can range from Extreme which is […]

We’ve run the full range of services in the cloud here at SSWUG.org, here are some of the wins we’ve seen with our own systems. I’ll take a look at some of the pros and cons over the next couple of days based solely on our own experiences. Our experience is based on moving from on-premise to co-located serves to […]

A little bit of documentation goes a long way. Recently, I’ve been using a technique where the documentation can do even more. What if you could manage your server environments in a manner similar to unit testing of software? Ok, that probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. So, let me break it down a little bit. In an Agile […]

As I have been thinking about encryption, the value it provides, and the applications to which it is applied, I started reviewing the types of encryption that still have some degree of efficacy. In 2014, when Snowden released documents with a lot of NSA capabilities, it was revealed publicly that the NSA had cracked the majority of the encryption schemes, […]