Many things change over the year and nothing is static. With novelty, we are experiencing renewed enthusiasm for life. Given that I live a very digital life, I have a lot of useful software changes I find valuable.
Hosting Environment Change
For the longest while I’ve been a great fan of Siteground shared hosting environment. For the time being this blog is still here. But as their prices skyrocketed over the years, and their service actually detoirated, I’ve started looking into alternatives.
What is the alternative?
Given that main reason why choosing Siteground was server speed and benefits it had on the SEO. When SiteGround transitioned to Google Cloud, I started to wonder why do I need customer support that is limiting, when I can manage my own server side environment.
Why Google Cloud?
While I used to be on a crusade against Google for the longest time, but when it comes to visibility, SEO and all things public, Google dominates. It is given that I value my privacy a lot, I also love visibility and exposure. I have a lot of thoughts on how to retain visibility while maintaining privacy.
However there is one more reason why Google Cloud started to appeal to me more. We’ve ended up working on multiple client environments where their go-to choice was GCP instead of AWS. During these projects we’ve found that starting micro services is very streamlined, and in some aspects even better than AWS.
We anticipate that GCP will take a larger piece of the pie, so making it our SEO environment where we will host sites, and our client sites will be a good way to get familiar with cloud alternatives beyond AWS and digital ocean.
Device Allocation – from Desktop to iPhone
It’s not enough that I have all these laptops, tablets etc, but now getting another iPhone. With the increase in the intrusion of business into my private life, and vice versa, I decided to make a hard border. While this could be accomplished if iPhone had user profiles like macOS does, we are not there.
One iPhone is dedicated to personal and social media / entertainment. Older iPhone is dedicated to work, and isolates me from anything that is a distraction. While having two iPhones may seem cumbersome, I didn’t have many problems so far.
The point of private phone is being able to plug out. It is very hard to live your life, when your business is getting into it. The same goes other way, your private messages intruding into your business hours, distracting you from the task at hand.
When it comes to computers, desktop is reserved for coding, laptop for daily communication work, invoicing and if anything else urgent is needed. But desktop is a focus device, and laptop is for communication and some heavier and faster lifting of files and organization.
Making a determination on wether the device is a communication / distraction centric or designated for focused work is a critical component of my overall digital productivity strategy.
Platform Agnostic
Due to such an extensive linux use, I started to observe my personal devices like terminals. CLI is increasingly becoming my native and default way of communicating with machines, and I am quite comfortable in it.
Becoming platform agnostic is making assumption that you are feeling comfortable utilizing text files, and file formats that have the least common denominator across various different devices.
All my apps in the ecosystem are able to access the storage on my servers, so I am not dependent on any third party services for my data.
Becoming Independent of Silicone Valley for Personal Productivity
I am limiting the usage of all tools and software that is build in San Francisco. Especially the free services. When it comes down to this data, I am unapologetically focused on not even housing my own ideas and thoughts on their servers. Every day I wake up, I feel good about the fact that I Am not dependent on my information to anyone, and that my systems are cross operating system portable, and open source.
Next Steps
Next steps will be all about putting these ideas from GIT into production and usage. It will be interesting to move over photos, music and other assets into my own cloud.
