It’s been a few weeks since I wrote anything, but I’ve been keeping busy.

Much of what I’ve been doing has been using tools I’ve written about in other posts, so I thought I’d mention “Linked In Learning” (formerly Lynda.com).

These are online courses, mostly with a technology and business focus, that you can take for about $30 / month. They are generally well done, and there are many topics available. You can subscribe month to month, and cancel whenever you want. Over the years, I’ve taken courses on various technologies, sometimes to quickly put the knowledge to use, and sometimes just to get an overview of the technology.

If you have some downtime, or can work some time into your day, consider taking courses. Your employer may even have a subscription you can use for free.

This week I found myself in need of some design help for a client. I went to a site I’ve used before – guru.com. This is a spot where you can post jobs for freelancers to bid on. The platform allows you to pay directly through that and go from there.

It’s always a little challenging working with someone you’ve never met, and aren’t sure how they will work out. So far this is going well, but a few tips if you need to sub out a job:

1. Clear requirements – the clearer you are in your request, the better chance of getting bids from relevant pros. If the project is time-sensitive, clarify that up front, so you don’t get pros who have a backlog of work.
2. Ignore placeholder bids – bids that are just generic, or don’t seem tailored to your needs, you should probably ignore.
3. Communicate often – set milestones and get / give feedback often. If you can do a live phone call, that is best to ensure the other person is understanding.

I’ve been working on a website using bootstrap for the front end. It’s been a little while since I did much with bootstrap, but it’s a very nice (almost standard) framework for building modern, responsive design sites. Anyway, getting reacquainted with it has been fun!

For my work with Operations Bridge monitoring platform, I did some integration to Service Now. This used a custom action – groovy script, which called a perl script to handle creation of an incident in Service now. Perhaps too many steps in there, but using perl, partially for legacy reasons, also gives us lots of control and fine tuning that would have been a pain with groovy. Plus, I’m not too great at groovy programming, so using perl was faster.

ITOM – As the title suggests, I spent a decent amount of time this week training and taking tests for certification in the “IT Operations Management” suite of products offered by Micro Focus. For one of my clients, I spend quite a bit of time working with Operations Bridge, among other products. I completed the certification, but it wasn’t easy! The overall suite of products is amazing.

Authorize.net – I’ve a reseller for a long time, but took some time this week to review their offerings. This is a leading payment provider for taking ecommerce / online payments. I suspect that any businesses not selling online will want to reconsider that after these past few months. I put together this payments page to explain how I can help.

Here’s what I was up to this week:

Zoom – Seems like everyone who never used a conferencing platform suddenly wanted one, all due to the corona shutdowns. Though I had used Zoom before many times with clients, I finally paid for my own subscription. This is handy for business and even personal use, since your invitees don’t need an account.

Flash EOL – as browsers move to ending Flash support, I had a client with some old flash content suddenly break. Turns out the javascript code we used to run the flash (swfobject.js) was no longer working with the latest browser updates. We just bit the bullet and moved the content to Youtube (it was video anyway). By the end of 2020, browser support for flash is going away, or so they say. I’m not sure I buy it.

Php – more custom php work, for an LMS, and also some other misc. work.

Corona note – So far my workload has kept strong during the economic muffling we’re going through. It’s hard to say how long that will continue, but these are times where new opportunities present themselves. Many industries may be changed after this, because the way we live will be different. Companies may start “onshoring” more, as a way to diversify production. Events and social gatherings may change. Some business models will die, but new ones will emerge. Stay aware, often great businesses rise from the ashes of a crisis.