Month: June 2020

Context and Perspective for Mindful Professionalism

Matthew KindzerskeLeave a comment

Almost ten years into IT/software consulting has taught me how to stay mindful, enthusiastic, and maintain perspective. I was in my backyard and happened upon an analogy with some morning glories I’m trying to grow.

“How did I get here? Why am I here?”

Not: “What am I doing here? How did I get myself stuck here, all by myself…”
Rather: “Let me learn all I can about the space I’m in. I’m sure there’s more to learn and I’m sure someone else would find my insights & experience valuable.”

“We’ve come a long, long way together…”

Not: “Look at everything I have to keep track of, all the loose ends I left behind, and the crap I’ll probably have to deal with again at some point.”
Rather: “I made it to where I am not just because of my successes, but also from the failures and having learned from them. I can extract confidence from either type of outcome, and this is my inner portfolio.”

“Where I’m going, I might not need a road…”

Not: “It’s all just one soul-sucking climb that never ends.”
Rather: “The future me may have different goals, let me chew off what I think I can do today, this week, this month, and this quarter. I know people will recognize and respect that I’m trying to build towards a larger goal even if I’m not 100% sure where or what it is.”

(Organic insecticidal soap really helps keep the bugs off.)

Thank you for viewing my morning glories.

WGET

Matthew KindzerskeLeave a comment

WGET, an indispensable tool for working with the web. Below are a few examples extracted from my CLI cheat-sheet, with explanation on syntax.

WGET & CURL: equivalent examples

wget -O index.html www.exampledomain.com

# The -O (upper case) is optional, and if omitted it usually saves as the index.html for the website.
curl -L www.exampledomain.com > index.html

# The -L follows all redirects before returning data.
# Curl normally spits out to the CLI, but the '>' redirects the named file.  Beware '>' overwrites, sometimes useful is '>>' to append.

Debugging

Sometimes it’s really useful to be able to grab a website in its entirety.

wget -pHk www.exampledomain.com

-p  fetches all accompanying assets (images, css, js) to view the site
-H  enables recursive run, to fetch assets from other hosts
-k  after downloading, this will change all asset links to local/relative

Extra

du -sh $pwd

After a wget -pHk (in an empty directory), use du -sh $pwd to see the size of your website. I’ve found this to be a good statistic to keep track of for UX/mobile purposes. Though there’s a lot to consider whether it’s CSS, JS, or other and a large website doesn’t necessarily mean it’s slow.