I'm still here. The only updates I have made to the blog in the past year have been updating my 'about' page to note the new addition to our family (which is a great thing!). My last blog post was published two weeks before my daughter was born, and now that her first birthday is coming up I feel like I'm in a good place to start writing again. Writing technical blog posts is such a departure from my day-to-day work that it can be hard to get "in the zone", especially with a new baby (now fully mobile toddler) around the house.

That being said, I did get a lot of things done during my break from writing for my blog. I wanted to post some of those things here in case it's of interest to anyone out there.

PassCard

PassCard is a secure password system I came up with years ago that I just now got around to putting up on GitHub. PassCard creates a keycard you can carry around and use to create complex passwords using simple words. It's reusable, and as long as you remember your generation password, you can can easily regenerate and print copies of your card if your first one goes through the wash. Check out the project on GitHub and get some more details on this project: https://github.com/m82labs/passcard

Murrow

I am a huge Linux nerd and love the older web technologies like RSS. These two interests, combined with a love of Python, lead to Murrow. Murrow is a console-based RSS aggregator written in Python 3. This is an educational project, but it has been a lot of fun and I use it every day. Murrow has some neat features (for a console app) like read-time estimates based on your actual read times of past articles, and pocket integration. Check out the project here: https://github.com/m82labs/murrow

Elasticsearch

No, I haven't contributed anything to the great Elasticsearch project, but I have been using it a lot. Expect to see future posts making a lot of use of Elasticsearch and Kibana to visualize performance data from SQL Server and create dashboards.

What's Next?

News posts! I expect to finish up a post on Resource Governor in the next week or less, as well as a longer post outlining some tips and tricks for managing multiple SQL Server instances. Even though it has been a year, I do plan to at least write a follow-up to my popular MariaDB backup post covering some of the advanced options and usage.