midwestern mac

Since 2014, I've been working for Acquia, doing some fun work with a great team in Professional Services. I started out managing some huge Drupal site builds for Acquia clients, and ended up devoting all my time for the past couple years to some major infrastructure projects, diving deeper into operations work, Ansible, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes in production.

In that same time period, I began work on my second book, Ansible for Kubernetes, but have not had the dedicated time to get too deep into writing—especially now that I have three young kids. When I started writing Ansible for DevOps, I had one newborn!

I started Server Check.in, a simple website and server uptime monitoring service, almost four years ago. I built it when I was in the hospital and recovering from mono (symptoms were worse because of one of the Crohn's-related drugs I was taking), and it's been a very slowly-but-steadily growing service since.

I wrote a four-year retrospective post on the service, and published it on the Server Check.in blog: Four years running Server Check.in.

After a few months of testing, I'm happy to announce Hosted Apache Solr now supports Search API Solr with Drupal 8! Both Search API and Search API Solr have been getting closer to stable releases, and more people have been requesting Drupal 8 search cores, so I decided to finish testing and updating support guides this weekend.

Server Check.in is a simple and inexpensive server and website uptime monitoring service I've recently launched.

If you have a website or online service you need to make sure is running, Server Check.in is a great way to get notified when there's a problem. Unlike most other monitoring solutions, Server Check.in offers free SMS (text) messages and email notifications, and it only costs $15/year (just $1.25/month!).

The Motivation

There are probably thousands of other uptime monitoring services on the web, and it's typically a good idea to use existing tools rather than build your own—if they're practical for your needs!

I had three main requirements for any service I wanted to use:

I just released Visbility, a simple Mac application that makes showing and hiding invisible files easy, via Midwestern Mac, LLC.

I created this app for three reasons:

Today I received the "Certificate of Organization" for Midwestern Mac, LLC, a Corporation that provides Mac support, web design and consultation, graphic design and photography to people in the Saint Louis area, but also on a broader scale through its website, www.midwesternmac.com.

The idea of forming an LLC came to me a few months ago, after leaving the Seminary, for two reasons: 1) so I could perform consulting services with some sort of legal protection (operating as a sole proprietorship = bad!), and 2) because I would like to build up a brand so I can possibly work more in the fields that I love most: web design and Mac support!