tkjef

My Side Hustle Journey

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My Journey

I have been working on side hustles
for most of my life.

Ever since I brought generic sodas
to school to sell for 50 cents.

I got them for 11 cents.

Dented, sticky soda covered, fallen
out of the box generic soda cans.

At this local “Redemption Store” it was called
in ol’ Scarborough, ME.

When my middle school banned soda
I was positioned to own the underground
soda market. 😎

Fast forward to adulthood and I started my development career by building a music downloads website called DigitalDubbed.

That site specialized in dubstep, triphop & chill
genres of electronic music.

That cost me $300/mo to keep the servers up and I was never able to turn a profit, but learned more dev skills.

I continued to try random ideas, but one that stuck and was reasonably successful around 2012 was MobileWeedApps.

Just making iphone and android apps for dispensaries right when they were starting to become legal.

That one was pulling in $5k/mo profit and was looking good, but I decided to focus on a new job at Magento and let it fade.

The next years were soooooooooo many failed attempts at business ideas & strategies.

But I did keep learning efficient ways to make websites, apps, do seo & do digital marketing.

Even though the business ideas were not fruitful, the tech & marketing lessons were getting built.

Looking for a house I ended up making a PITI calculator android app which was kind of fun.
Currently at 33k+ downloads!

Didn’t figure out a way to make money from it,
but during that process came across the Brave browser referral program.

This was paying out $5-$7.50 for each person that
kept the browser installed for 30 days.

After playing around with a few blog articles I found a loophole in Microsoft Ads that allowed the brave referral link right in the ad.

It looked like a legit link (this was banned by Adwords,
and has since been banned by Microsoft Ads).

This allowed for TONS of users to download the browser
through my referral link for very cheap.

Ended up getting enough profit to put a small down payment on a house in the mountains.

I got the house during Covid, and started a plow company.

That lasted about a week and
I realized I was in way over my head.

However, I had a sweet domain of mtnplow.com and figured I’d make a directory for snow removal service providers.

I broke it down to individual neighborhoods
which has been quite helpful.

That idea ended up really catching on and has been
steadily growing since 2021 (900+ instagram followers!).

While it was cool to have identified a real need
I did see limitations of targeting mountain regions.

I started researching the best business verticals to target using the same strategy of growing a community interest around a niche set of service providers.

In addition, I researched the most lucrative areas.

I settled on running my own junk removal business targeting the Southern California areas with the brand 760 HAUL.

And I kept a mountain brand going with MTN HAUL covering Lake Arrowhead & Running Springs.

That went decent until about January of 2025.
Now I’m shooting for more.

Las Vegas, San Diego & Gilbert are now my new areas under the HAULS brand.

Feeling proud of what I’ve built these on, and excited about the future!

How a CDN Speeds Up Performance & More!

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

CDNs don't just speed up your site.

With the right setup, you can add security, disaster recovery and rollover during peak traffic spikes throughout the work week.

With proper understanding of a CDN, you can add better delivery performance and reliability to your site's customers.

A content delivery network is one of the most important tools of any webmaster with a large and diverse user base.

It works by caching your content on servers around the world so users may quickly access content without latency issues.

While most CDN subscribers may be thinking about the speed of their website, there are a few niche benefits as a bonus.

How a CDN Delivers Traffic to Your Users

With traditional hosting, you lease server space and upload your website files to the server's storage.

Whether you have shared hosting or a dedicated server, the host's equipment is always in one location.

Higher end dedicated servers speed up server processing, but it doesn't address the issue of distance between the origin server and the user accessing the website.

The "origin server" is a CDN term given to the hosting server that houses your website content.

Although data traverses the internet at the speed of light,
distance still affects performance.

Users must send requests from their computers and wait for these requests to reach the server.

The server then sends data back to the user at the same speed and distance.

Users see the wait times for data to download as "lag" or performance issues from your site.

You can't control the user's bandwidth or the distance between these users and your origin server, but you can bring servers closer to users in the form of "edge servers" hosted by a CDN.

CDNs lease space in data centers across the globe.

They call these locations "point of presence (PoP)" data centers.

When you sign up to a CDN service, you should identify their PoPs to find out if they have a data center located in close proximity to a majority of your traffic.

If you service mostly people in the US, then most CDNs have several PoPs across the US.

Most CDNs have dozens of locations across the globe, but you should still verify that your chosen CDN has a data center close to your users.

With a CDN closer to users, now any traffic sent to your website is instead sent to the CDN's edge servers.

These edge servers have cached content from your origin server.

So not only do you have a boost in speed due to having a closer location to the user, but content is served from cache.

Which makes processing requests much faster.

Cached content is processed and sent from server memory, which is much faster than distributing content from a hard drive.

What Happens When You Update Content?

A CDN edge server caches content, but you then need it to pull the latest data when your data changes.

The CDN server polls your origin server for changes, so cached content is kept up-to-date.

When you update content, every edge server updates its cache, so the most traffic you could see on your origin server comes from CDN updates.

One benefit of a CDN is that you reduce the amount of traffic on your hosting server, which then saves you money in hosting fees.

The biggest benefit to a CDN is that large amounts of data are sent to edge servers where users can download them in cache.

Gaming developers and any software company that distributes large files over the internet can benefit from these servers.

Traditionally, a server for a gaming update would slow down considerably on patch day.

Several gigabytes would be downloaded by gaming users all at once.

With a CDN, you distribute these downloads across data centers and edge servers, and users download from the closest location.

Any updated content is replicated to your CDN's data center, so you don't need to worry about updates.

You upload changes to the origin server and the CDN servers take care of the rest.

How a CDN Can Help with Cyber Security, Disaster Recovery and SEO

Your CDN can stop DDoS attacks from harming your site's performance when combined with the right firewall and intrusion detection system.

DDoS attacks launch with no warning, so monitoring is needed to stop it before it exhausts server resources.

With a CDN, you no longer need to worry about floods of traffic at your origin server without the right defenses.

Protecting Against DDOS Attacks or Spam Bots

In 2018 alone, several large companies were hit with debilitating denial of service (DDOS) attacks in order to interrupt their businesses.

This included a record-setting 1.35 Tbps against Github.

For smaller websites, you have no match against amateur zombie networks that sap up a few Gbps of bandwidth.

CDN providers like Cloudflare will have an "under attack" setting
so those suspicious users will have to complete a captcha for each page request.

For legitimate users, it will be trivial to solve the captcha while bots will be halted before causing harm.

Circumventing National Censorship

A user may use a website cache plugin or program to download content straight from your CDN server without resolving your domain name.

This allows the user to completely bypass government firewalls that block websites at the DNS level.

Of course, this becomes harder if they begin blocking IP address ranges.

Since most of the biggest pages on the internet make use of the same CDN servers, governments avoid blocking CDN IP addresses.

As long as the connection is encrypted via SSL, your users from such countries will have a way to access your content.

Disaster Recovery

Help with disaster recovery is one of the most significant side benefits of
of using a CDN for your SEO efforts.

Suppose a major ISP router fails and users can't access your site.

You have no control over a failed ISP router, so you must wait until the ISP is able to fix it.

The ISP might reroute traffic, but even rerouting traffic kills performance.

With a CDN, if one router or data center fails, users are rerouted to the next closest edge server within the network.

This could be a location that is still within 1,000 miles to your users' location, so they see no difference in performance.

Instead of having a slow website, your users see no changes and continue downloading content as if they are still connected to the original data center.

Rollover is common with CDNs when a data center fails, so you add disaster recovery to your infrastructure with just a few extra dollars a month.

If you rely on your site for revenue, then having a CDN can add numerous disaster recovery benefits without worrying about a crashed server.

Search Engine Optimization

While keywords, fulfilling user intent and backlinks are the main determining factors in Google search rankings, site load speeds are also considered.

If your website is overloaded, located far away, or simply not properly optimized at the operating system level, Google may see its slow load speed as a hindrance.

A CDN will help with caching the most recent revision of your website so that the Google bot will see the freshest content at the fastest speed possible.

Some services will purge redundant content, which aids with concealing duplicate content issues from Google.

Whether your goal is faster performance or disaster recovery for a critical site,
a CDN can benefit you more than traditional hosting.

CDNs have locations around the globe, so even a simple change can speed up your website.

These changes can make a substantial impact and should be a part of any website, mobile application, or online community.

You will benefit from having a CDN by optimizing your site for search engines, web security, and increasing your international reach.

Next post:
What is Brave browser?

Custom Logs in Your Applications

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It's not uncommon for developers to code their own logging modules into applications.

We do this to compensate for limitations in operating system standard logging functionality which doesn't always provide the level of monitoring needed for an enterprise application.

If you've decided that you need custom logs for your application, here are a few events that you don't want to skip.

Poor Performance and Load Times

An operating system will log any events where the application crashes due to a timeout, but these logs only tell you when the application crashes, not when it’s showing signs of performance degradation.

As your user base grows and the application supports more traffic, your infrastructure and resources should scale.

It’s not uncommon for infrastructure to have improper capacity planned, as well as be insufficiently setup to scale appropriately at the right triggers.

These mistakes can lead to application timeouts.

With custom application logs, you can write events that give Ops a heads-up when the application is taking too long to load.

You determine an acceptable time for pages to load, and then create events in a log that indicate the application is taking too long to process.

For instance, if a page should only take five seconds to load, then you should write events to a log when load times reach three seconds.

SRE can monitor these events and scale resources when the server needs better CPU power, memory resources, and bandwidth.

This eases stress and limits business revenue impact.

It also helps to understand the application deeper as you track the metrics often daily fine tuning thresholds, times, types of count (min,max,median,avg) and the general runbook or automation strategies.

Side Income Blog in 7 Easy Steps

Sat, 02 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Every month, a handful of business-minded folks start making money by creating blogs.

Some will make thousands of dollars every month!

The amount of money you earn depends on factors such as available opportunities and your audience, but there's no reason you can't make it.

Here are some simple steps to create a successful residual-income blog of your own.

Choose a good topic.

Before anything else, you must think of a topic and niche to blog about.

Thankfully, there's no shortage of things you can cover, but selectivity is important.

You should ideally go for a subject you're passionate about or have an interest in.

Ask yourself whom you are targeting, what level of competition you'll face, and whether the topic or niche is sustainable.

At the same time, make sure your blog remains focused on a single topic or a few tightly related topics, so you don't confuse the search engines and your readers by talking about too many things.

You love your hobbies, but did you ever think they could actually make you money?

While some hobbies are just for fun, other pastimes are great for bringing in extra cash, so you can get a double benefit doing the things you love.

HTTP/2 & TLSv1.3: 2019 adoption

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

HTTP/2 and TLSv1.3 specifications
come with many new improvements.

These internet protocol standard specifications are core to all we do.

Knowing the benefits of these improvements,
as well as how to take advantage of them,
drives development and architecture.

HTTP/2 Highlights

- Current adoption 33.1% (as of 2019/02/02) cited from: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ce-http2/all/all - All requests on connection share the same stream which removes the Head Of Line problem with HTTP/1.1 - Headers are compressed with references to header (this includes those large cookies that can crash Angular apps) - Header compression format used: https://http2.github.io/http2-spec/compression.html - Requires encryption

TLSv1.3 Highlights

Current adoption 0.06% (as of 2017/12/26) cited from: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-tls-1-3-isnt-in-browsers-yet/

Separates key agreement and authentication algorithms from cipher suites

What is brave browser?

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

More and more consumers want to maintain their privacy and security online.

Unfortunately, this goal often conflicts with a company’s goal of making money. Businesses of all sizes earn money from tracking or utilizing consumer information.

More people these days are recognizing targeted advertisements after they’ve been searching for something.

For obvious reasons, not everyone wants to deal with this kind of web browsing experience. Brave Software Inc recently released a browser that addresses these concerns and more.

Hello World from tkjef

Sun, 03 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just starting a personal blog
to talk about things of interest:
git, sre, load testing, security
& the hashicorp tool chain

Might touch on some Kubernetes
or general internet-related topics as well.

Will be running some benchmarks of tools,
setups & apps.

I’ve been working with AWS for 6+ years,
Linux for 11+ years,
and was a Ragga-Jungle/Dubstep/Hip-Hop DJ in Los Angeles before that.

Recently, was quoted in the O’Reilly book Seeking SRE by David Blank-Edelman.

Started with PHP & Flash in 2007
and made a music downloads website
called digitaldubbed.com (defunct) up for 1.5 yrs.

That sparked the dev fire.

After a bit of spamming on Twitter
I landed a freelance client in the Hollywood area,
quit my job, and started freelance developing full-time.

With more clients in tow came standardizing the work,
using different languages (Javascript, C#)
& setting up and storing code/db backups.

Also, created a couple of Android apps in
Java using Eclipse (Android Studio wasn’t around yet!).

Chasing down clients for money got a little old
so ended up landing at a small startup under the
umbrella of Realtor.com and working with Perl and Postgres.

I’d never worked with Perl before, but it was a blast.

Also, geekuni.com had just launched for Perl training
so I felt like even though the language wasn’t
extremely popular there were some resources.

It also ended up making me better at Linux.

This is where I was introduced to AWS, Jenkins & Puppet.
As well as doing some light DBA work.

Fast-forward a few years, looking for new jobs led me into Ruby On Rails,
but after a few months went back to PHP and landed at Magento.

There I automated the testing workflows with Vagrant to accommodate
all variations of technology that were officially supported by Magento.

This enabled engineers to spin up isolated test environments
from customer code/db backups, do aggressive/destructive testing,
then destroy the test env.

After that, moved onto Directv where I saw a lot of the inefficiences
that SRE work could solve, geeked out on satellites (they ran Debian6!),
spun up a K8s POC, and moved onto a medium-sized startup
as a Java dev (with an Operations focus).

First project was re-writing the geo-ip lookup Class.

Ongoing work consisted of reviewing bi-weekly github sprint commits
for areas of improvement or discussion.

I quite enjoyed the mix of dev, review of code & working with servers,
but the trappings of a healthy bottom line (they did well)
made moving to the cloud not an essential business requirement.

This led to wayward cloud initiatives with multiple attempts at moving to AWS failing.

Did I mention this was also a Windows Server shop?

With a fair amount of tech debt.

While the foray back into dev was fun, my heart is in SRE work.

Since then I’ve been working with Terraform a TON, Chef (mostly), Puppet (somewhat) and Salt (currently).

Also, currently using Consul & Nomad while looking at Kubernetes for some POCs to benchmark against that.

Worked with lots of monitoring, logging and apm options.

I like vim.
And less.
And gzip w/ zless/zgrep.
And bash.
And perl.
And php.
what.

I have a few open source projects
you can check out on my github.com/tkjef

Looking to create more
and work on other projects.