My Interview with Packt

by Michael Badger on September 24, 2009

Scratch 1.4 Book Cover

I recently took a few moments to reflect on the writing process and answer some questions from my publisher.

Here are some excerpts:

Packt: How did you find the overall experience of writing your book for Packt?
Michael:Writing is a somewhat lonely proposition, but I enjoyed the time alone with my thoughts, the Scratch cat, and stack of blocks. This loneliness doesn’t last forever and when I opened my box of newly printed books; it was almost akin to watching the birth of my son Cameron.

Packt: Our authors usually have full-time jobs whilst writing for us. Was this the case for you and how did you approach managing your time?
Michael: I estimate that I spent between 10 and 20 hours a week writing this book, which includes all the non-writing time, such as research, project planning, and editing. I feel smarter for not having spent that time drowning in reality television.

Read the rest of the interview at the Packt Authors web site.

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You Give Me a System Error

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by Michael Badger on December 3, 2009

It’s hard to convince people that things like monitoring and testing are important business processes. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much effort to find real world business cases for monitoring. Here’s one, now.

I tried to request more information from a website about two hours ago and was greeted with a goofy “system error encountered” error. The same error persists after two hours. How many leads do you lose per hour or day when your web forms break?

Downtime is unavoidable; knowing your down is critical. When your website has multiple moving parts, those parts may break independent of the whole site – And usually as a result of human’s carelessness. Monitoring and automated testing provide assurance that you’ll find the problem before you lose the lead that doubles your company.

Your customers are only a click away from finding the information from someone who cares to keep their systems running.

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Write a whitepaper from conference presentation

October 28, 2009
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I just presented at a couple of conferences and as a consequence of presenting, I devoted a considerable amount of time to preparing. I knew that I’d spend less than two hours using that content in my talk. Wouldn’t it be nice to reuse that content in some other meaningful way?
Recently, one of MoJo Active’s [...]

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Subscribe to WordPress Category

October 21, 2009
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Did you ever wish you could syndicate a single category in WordPress or subscribe to a single category on someone’s blog? There are WordPress plugins that add category level subscriptions, but a plugin not necessary.
Click on any category link and then append /feed to the end of the url. For example, the url for my [...]

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Self Host Scratch Projects

October 19, 2009

When I was in Columbus, a couple people asked me how to host Scratch projects on your own web server. Scratch makes it easy to share projects on the web, but for one reason or another, some people may want to host projects on a server they control.
So, for the first tip in my Scratch [...]

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OLF2009 Audio Presentations

October 6, 2009

The Internet Archive is hosting several of the recorded presentations from OLF 2009, including my own. The embedded player provided by the IA doesn’t include a playlist, which means it’s not very useful.
Click through to the Internet Archive and have listen to the Ohio Linux Fest 2009 talks.

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