I'm back

It's been a year and a half since I last posted here, it's hard to believe how fast time flies! I've been busy making music, the latest of which you can hear here:  https://soundcloud.com/randal-kamradt-sr and three complete CDs now available on iTunes/Amazon/CDBaby, under my psuedonom Arkay.  I have three more CDs worth of songs sitting on my hard drive now waiting to be polished and published.
Mostly for the year and a half I've been very busy with projects at work, and I've had to give up other side activities such as ToteMs editor, playing in the Will Power band, and singing in my Choir.  And the thanks I get for the extra work, is I find my position will be eliminated in September, no more cozy work from home job.
So, for the past few months, I've been spending almost all my spare time catching up on technology, learning new languages and new facilities for programming.  I've started a new blog  http://rlkamradt.wordpress.com/ which is almost strictly about programming.  I'm posting here because I took some time today and over that past week, working on getting some of my servers back in working condition.  Mostly so I would have a work-like environment in which to try out some new tricks.  So I have my main server 'codemonkey' with Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, and Nexus installed and running so I can begin doing more Java programming.  I'm especially interested in taking the new features of Java 8 out for a spin.
There's been a big blossoming of what is called 'Platform as a Service', or PaaS.  One of the leaders in that field is cloudbees.com, and I signed up for an account with them to try them out.  Also codeship.io and heroku.com provide cloud services, but less oriented towards Java like Cloudbees.  I set up codemonkey as my own person PaaS, so I can get the hang of working with it and administrating it.  I've switched completely over to github as a repository for  my code.  A lot of this I discovered last year at JavaOne, but haven't really had a chance to look at them until now.  I remember the Cloudbees display as @kohsukekawa was buzzing around promoting his new company.  The only other CEO I saw at JavaOne was Vaadin's @joonaslehtinen, although I did go to a party with some game company from the SF area.
When I first put codemonkey together, I found there's new server management available called Zentyal. I tried EBox a few years back, and found it frustrating and unreliable.  I had high hopes for Zentyal, until I found it's based on EBox.  It's added a lot of features, and has a console GUI interface, not just an HTTP interface.  But it still seems a bit too unreliable to make use of all the features that I had hoped to try out.  So I reinstalled Ubuntu 14.04 with basic SSH and LAMP capabilities and then spent about a day installing Java 8, Jenkins, Nexus, Confluence and Jira.  I still have to set up all the pieces and the temporary license for Confluence and Jira are up in a couple weeks, so I have to shell out 10 buck (which Atlassian donates to charity) for the starter pack licenses.  But it will be worth it to get the experience in learning the ins and outs of all these applications, especially if my next job moves me into more of a leadership role (a bona fide leadership role, not the leadership I've been providing at my current job without the title).
I'll try to post more often with the fun adventures I have maintaining hardware and the different cloud apps that I'm getting used to.  As September approaches I will have to spend more time in the job hunting department, but hopefully one I find one, and things settle down, I can get back to all the extra-curricular activities, such as my recording, my writing for Damngoodtunes.com and singing in my choir.