This guide will walk through setting up an SSL certification and installing it on your server. I used these steps in the past for Jira and Confluence, but there are many uses for this. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. According to Digicert, “SSL allows sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and login credentials to be transmitted securely. Normally, data sent between browsers and web servers is sent in plain text—leaving you vulnerable to eavesdropping. If an attacker is able to intercept all data being sent between a browser and a web server they can see and use that information.”

(more…)

I’ve been interviewing for a position at my company for a few weeks now and I can’t help but notice how frequently some (what I would assume) basic concepts of getting a job are completely ignored. I was recently browsing social media when I came across someone complaining about the difficulty of finding a job. Their gripe with the process was someone telling them to try harder. The person argued, “How do I try harder? Do I type my resume harder? Do I hit submit harder? etc.” It made me chuckle. This sparked a response where I decided to write a quick guide on landing a job. Let’s start with the resume:

(more…)

My article relating to Peer-to-Peer Lending is one of my most popular articles with over 6,000 visits. I think that’s a rather huge accomplishment for a personal website with no desire to publically broadcast. One of the items I talk about later in the article is how to reduce risk while increasing rewards. Using backtracked data that spans billions of dollars, I decided to test out a few algorithms that could potentially maximize my return interest.

After testing these algorithms for over a year, I was astonished at the results. I’ll share these in a moment. I thought to myself, “what if I can share this with the world?” It was a unique challenge for me. I knew that Lending Club offered API, as I discussed in the aforementioned article. What I wanted to know was whether or not it was possible to interact with other people’s accounts and share the same algorithm using that same API. It was. While challenging at times, I believe my efforts were worth it.

Today, I introduce to you Flux Robot – www.fluxrobot.com. You can see the results at the bottom of the page or in the performance section.

I came across an interesting scenario today while I was building an application that required me opening a file, reading it line by line, and importing it into a dataset. The reason this was an interesting scenario is because there is data that belongs to a specific identifier on different lines.

(more…)

I came across a database that has suffered a lot of deadlocks recently. This, along with slow query execution among other problems led me to convince management that the database required downtime. Some of the maintenance I performed was re-building tempdb tables and moving them off the C Drive, which I highly recommend for various reasons. You can read more on that here.

(more…)

I’ve had a television service ever since I was a little kid. I remember when I had an antenna on top of my box that we called “bunny ears.” Yes, the television was a large box with ears. We had to adjust the antenna once in a while to get clear reception, or the channels would get some fuzz or be gone completely with white noise. The problem was that some of the channels would be clear and others would not. If I wanted to see another channel, I would go up to the television and change the channel by a knob. I may have had to adjust the antenna again to get a picture. We knew something was on a channel at a certain time through TV Guide. It’s still around today, but it’s all digital. It was similar to a magazine, and it had ads throughout so you knew what the latest and greatest shows were.

(more…)