Some infrastructure changes

In addition to using several programming languages, I also like to experiment with different web infrastructures.

A few weeks ago I switched from using gmail as my primary email service to using fastmail.com. I still use gmail as a backup email and for my Google identity but I decided that I liked Fastmail a bit better and the yearly cost is not much.

The other change I have made is switching my www.markwatson.com web site from a Ruby + Sinatra web app on my own server to a PHP app running on Google's AppEngine. My absolutely favorite feature of AppEngine is the rolling system logs that can be checked easily from the AppEngine console. When I worked at Google in 2013, I loved the internal development environment (Borg, online system logs, the Cider IDE, and much more). Using AppEngine is, in a small way, reminiscent of Google's internal environment - at least enough so to make me nostalgic :-)

I have never been a huge fan of PHP although I have used it over the years for occasional tasks for customers and (rarely) for my own web properties. Without using third party libraries, PHP with HTML, CSS, and a little JavaScript seems pleasantly low level and easy to hack.

As much as I like devops and in general configuring and running Linux servers (often VPSs on Azure, Digital Ocean, and AWS), I sometimes feel a little guilty spending time on operations: perhaps my time could be better spent. My preferred PaaS providers are AppEngine and Heroku, with Cloud Foundary technology services (like IBM's Bluemix) also fairly nice. One thing that has always bothered me with PaaS however are "free" usage tiers. For one thing I like being a paying customer with SLAs, support, etc. Also, free tiers have to affect to some degree pricing for paid users.

Location: Sedona, AZ 86336, USA

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