Starting at Kiva Soon, setting up Linux to experiment with…

I’ll be starting work as Kiva Systems this coming Monday. Looking forward to getting deep into complex technical problems again and back into development work.

It was sad wrapping up my last day at GE/Oni, but I think the time had come and as endings go this wasn’t a terribly bad one. It seems that pretty much everyone  I know of who was actively looking has found something and the rest are settling in to other priorities for the summer. We’re still waiting for the final pay-out, but that was clearly noted as taking on the order of a month.

I’ve set up a spare machine here to run CentOs (Red Hat Enterprise Linux fork that is free) and started reading some Linux admin stuff. Most of the development processes seem to have remained mostly unchanged since I last touched Linux. Admin processes have changed (the yum package manager) and various things are now interesting that were not back then (http servers, MySQL, etc.).

I picked up an SSD for my main desktop machine (Win 8.1 box) and took some time to get the OS transferred. It was a bit frustrating as the differences were sufficient that neither drive cloning tool I had would handle it. I finally succeeded using a disaster recovery backup (command line version worked nicely) and then did a ‘recovery’ onto the new SSD.

I’ve still got more reading and learning to do on the Java front, but I expect that will be ongoing for the forseeable future as there is much to learn.