I started fiddling with the neat, lightweight Ruby web application framework “Sinatra” the other day. It seemed like a nice alternative to Rails and since I had also been playing with Slim for PHP, I wanted to see what it was like on the Ruby side of the fence.

I got the whole thing set up in Vagrant after no small amount of fiddling with Chef. I wanted to run it under Unicorn with Nginx in front, as is recommended by many for production deploys. After getting it all lined up, the app finally ran! Awesome, time to do some development!

So everyone uses Github now, and that’s cool, because Github is awesome. But what if Github goes down, even just for a short time, and you’re sitting there trying to get your stuff deployed or whatever? You’re basically screwed. Though Github is a fantastically stable service, it does have the occasional availability hiccup and the only real solution to that problem is redundancy.

So what’s a guy (or gal) to do? Run your own private git repository somewhere else!

Here at the day job, we are slowly moving our (production) systems away from Windows and toward (Ubuntu LTS) Linux. The company has always been Windows-oriented, mostly due to the decisions of its President when it was founded, subsequent inertia, and the skillsets of the infrastructure teams. Now, though, we have an increased Linux knowledgebase in-house, we’ve started this reorientation toward PHP and other open-source products, and Linux just makes more sense.

I’ll try to keep this brief. Five years ago, I left my job as a production PHP programmer at a national consulting firm (business consulting, not development consulting) to take a job writing ColdFusion at a startup on the other side of the state.

Since then, I have learned the ins and outs of an arcane version of ColdFusion while using more modern languages, such as Ruby and Python, only in my spare time. Finally, after all these years, the business sees fit to undertake a rewrite and to leave ColdFusion behind. After much deliberation, PHP was chosen.