After spending sometime researching hosting providers, it came down to two: Slicehost and Linode. While it was pretty much a toss up, I ended up choosing Linode, because I thought their pricing/feature combination was slightly better. The setup process was fairly smooth . However, it took me longer to get my blog up and running, because I struggled to get MovabeType working with Nginx, and Plack. I would love to hear from folks who have gotten this working. I finally abandoned it and went with my previous setup using Apache. So, my blog is finally up, running on Ubuntu thanks to the great library of documentation that Linode provides to help in configuring various Linux packages.

My name is Garett Chang, and for my day job I work as a software developer in the New York City metro area. I’ve been in the field for a number of years now, doing mostly web development, since the days when you coded CGI in Perl and, believe it or not, C (we’ve come a long way since then, but I’m still having nightmares), and Netscape was the dominant web browser and server software platform (at least in my world).

Currently, most of my work is done with Microsoft tools, specifically .NET, but I’m also comfortable on the UNIX platform, where I spent several years working as a Java developer. I’ve also worked on projects that required integration between the two platforms.

What else can I say?

I love to read, so I have quite a large collection of books. In terms of technology, I enjoy reading about distributed systems and software architectures, but please don’t consider me an architecture astronaut.

With this blog I hope to share, mostly learn, and grow my technical and non-technical knowledge, as well as have some fun along the way.