It’s technically been an entire week since I blogged as my last post was Monday, after midnight.
The craziness that has ensued this week!
It was all well and good until Wednesday. I’d spent the last few work days casually working without a project – investigating responsive design both for the company, and for myself. Emphasis on the latter.

And this happens:

And then BAM! My boss’ boss basically said (with his actions) “I’m not confident with project X in person A’s hands, I’m going to give project X to you!”

And what a project this project X was. I can’t go into the details, but it involved an ad around the Super Bowl in the US. An ad in the Super Bowl is…probably $X million dollars for 30s. And my project was directly related to that. THE PRESSURE. It’s okay, “no one watches the Super Bowl in the US” said no one ever.

I spent the week both doing development (Wed-Thurs), being on call during stress tests (Thurs-Fri), and being a fill-in system administrator (Fri-Sat) and finally, monitoring everything (Sun).

I was able to move a website from grid hosting (shared services) to dedicated hosting. That meant I:

• Migrated code over to a new server
• Migrated SSL to a new server (same domain)
• Changed the DNS on a domain
• Created a new database user, a new database, and new tables from scratch (with the help of phpMyAdmin – so it wasn’t so hard)

I did all of the above in less than 2 hours. It was a tough 2 hours, and I was most fearful of migrating an SSL Certificate to a new server (never done that before) but it turned out to be easy.

Later that night, I

• configured PHP settings from scratch
• Set up SSH and through it, optimized Apache and mySQL via SSH Commands at the root level

The day after that, I optimized my code a bit

• Created an .htaccess file at the root and added Cache control header for images, javascripts, and CSS to deal with load
• Enabled GZIP compression with mod_deflate for low page-transfer time
• Optimized JavaScript files to point internally

And finally, was left monitoring my Facebook App on Sunday, during the Super Bowl.

So there’s a reason I haven’t blogged – or tbh, done much of anything. I’ve been working. 37 hours overtime from Wednesday to Sunday. That’s an entire work week…compressed within 5 days, and including 3 days of regular work. So..that’s a lotta work! Couldn’t do Photography, or much less RELAX. But it’s all over now. Back to my regularly scheduled program.

I hope to watch some cartoons tonight and do photography.
Tomorrow, catch up on some work items and get back to learning responsive layout.