Life with Tim

Life is full of changes both personal and professional. Monday marks a big change for me professionally. Monday I start a new job at a new company. I have had a fair number of changes in my career. I've gone from Java developer, to Oracle Database Administrator, to Oracle Everything Administrator, to Java Developer, to team lead/Developer, and now to a new company as a Software Developer. I really enjoyed my time at UW-Madison. I learned a lot and grew my skills as a software engineer. I also got my hands dirty with some system operations. A great group of people with fun opportunities. I'm moving to a newish (8 years old) company called Spredfast. The Spredfast social marketing platform sifts through millions of pieces of social content per minute, so brands can participate in individual conversations or amplify relevant content across any digital screen. The platform allows customers to engage in real-time. Combined with comprehensive data, Spredfast creates more interactio...

Trello.com did not pay me for this endorsement, although if they wanted to please feel free to reach out :).  I'm not going to explain what Trello is other than it's a fancy lists of things. To Do lists on steroids, if you will. You can read that at  https://trello.com/home . I'm more going to focus on how I use Trello. I started using Trello a couple years ago and I found it really helps declutter my thoughts. Being an adult and stuff, I got a lot on my mind. So I created a board for "Life Thoughts". This has a couple columns. The basic "ToDo" list. These are for general wants, whether it be something I want off Amazon, to life goals. I also have some shared boards with C. We have one for our grocery list. It uses the Labels to say what part of the store its in. It has a simple "To Get", "Got", and "Meal Plan Ideas". It works out really well for us. When we are almost out of something we just bust out our phones and ad...

At work we are blessed with the freedom to work with a wide selection of technologies. This is a wonderful thing that lets the mind be free from restriction. Where this becomes an issue is when teams try to work together. There is a history issue at work to work in silos. Teams work independently on the idea with little input from outside contributors until the product is done. This is getting better though brown bags and user groups but still needs some work. One area that needs help is chat clients. I found people love using there own chat client for their given team. We have a campus wide XMPP service which works fine. Its just chat after all. If that was it, there would be no point to this blog post. There is also Skype for Business that DoIT started implementing. Honestly XMPP is much better for chat, but some people deem that they will only use Skype and nothing else.  Then we have teams using Slack. Slack has a lot of great features, but one disadvantage is you have to sig...

I had a fun experiment with my GitHub blog , but I decided I'm coming back to blogger for now for simplicity. It was a clever exercise in utilizing github's gist site to generate a collection of files (posts) with some configuration (another file in the gist), and generate a blog from it using github's REST API, angular, and material design. <nerd-digest> If you want to learn more about what I did, here is the gist and the code . </nerd-digest>. I really enjoyed creating the site, but it was time. The site was great. The only thing that was lacking was a good place to write the posts. I tried using many sites to write in markdown, but didn't find one that I really liked. I did like writing posts in markdown, maybe I can figure that out with blogger? Anyway, needless to say, I'm back on blogger :) Steam has a couple sales per year that are pretty epic with discounts. Two that I've found so far which I think are really good deals are Project Cars ...

Hi. I am really bad about writing in all my blogs, so I decided to consolidate them. You can find my new blog here:  http://timlevett.github.io/ . Looking forward to seeing you in my new space. UPDATE: This is now false, cheers.

As of 7/23/2015 I got bored this evening and decided to call all the local breweries and ask them the following questions. Do you fill growlers, do you fill other breweries growlers, and how much. Here is a little table for ya: Brewery Do they Fill? Do they fill other breweries Growlers? Cost (low/high) Great Dane Yes Yes 14 One Barrel Yes Yes 12/20 Hop Cat* Yes No 14/18 Al Asylum Yes Yes 12/15 Next Door Yes Yes 13.50/20 Vintage Yes Yes 12/32 House of Brews Yes No (prebottled) 15 (including dep.) Karben4 Yes Yes 10/13 * : not a brewery, i know A big thing with bigger places was that the growler had the surgeon general warning on it, so don't scratch that off. Lastly it has to be sealable. Overall, it was pretty common to fill up a growler, excellent, and even better, you just need one (at most places). So there you have it, cheers. - Tim

My goal for 2014 was to be still . No life altering events. For the most part I succeeded. My other goal for this year was to excel at running and try out a triathlon. Well, injury happened which killed my running this summer. Not before some excellent races though. I did my childhood dream of running the Grand Rapids River Bank Run 25K. Finished in 1:55. The following weekend I ran a back to back race called conquer the capital (10k then 1/2 marathon the next day). That probably wasn't very bright :). During my downtime I did a lot of cross training though and now getting back into running. I only ran for 4 months out of the year but still covered over 390 miles. After injury I was told I could bike as long as it didn't hurt, I covered 989 miles. I know, super nerdy to keep all that data, but hey I like data :). All and all, it was a good year. So what to do for a goal in 2015?  Triathlon sounds nice, lets do one of those. Lets also make it a goal not to do 2 weekend races ...