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  • Career Change Need Advice: Professional Web Developer

    - by bikedorkseattle
    I'm hoping to get some advice here on the steps I should take to make a career change into professional web development. I've been working in cancer research the last 14 years and I need a change. The job market is terrible, the pay is worse, and despite what one would think the atmosphere is generally un-collegial, even in your own group. Venture funding never returned after the dot com burst and with 3 to 5 wars our country is now in, NIH funding is only going to get worse. I know things are not going to get better for my field, sadly, and I know I need to move on. For probably just as long I have fiddled around with web development, I even run a fairly popular site with close to 1 million/month pageviews that pulls a decent income, but not stable enough to live off of right now. My skills are ok for being self taught. I enjoy the fast paced nature of the web and the tools the community creates and how eager people are to help and share knowledge; it's what science should be. I have been trying to find an entry level developer job doing standard HTML/CSS/PHP/MySQL/JS/jQuery type work. A good 50%+ of the jobs want someone with a CS degree, and most want 5 years experience. Having no professional experience and no formal education, I know I'm at a huge disadvantage. I am now considering my options on how to move forward professionally. The way I see it I have basically 3 options. Build up my portfolio of work as much as I can and continue to learn as much as I can on my own. Try to contribute on some open source project when time allows. Network like crazy and go to meetups. Be confident and pray a lot in private. OR While doing above, do some certification programs in PHP and Java, possibly others. Get a Zend Certification. OR Spend a few years getting a CS degree while doing 1. I've already done the work fulltime go to school thing and it doesn't excite me one bit. I didn't have the greatest college experience and am not too eager to return, but I have a family to feed. Is the degree really necessary or is it more of a right of passage type thing in most instances? I appreciate everyones input. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

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  • Dedicated Servers: Is one better then two for LAMP pseudo HA setup? [closed]

    - by bikedorkseattle
    Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? I know there are zillions of commentary about hosting out there, but I haven't read much about this. Our current well known host is having too many problems, the hardware we are on it subpar, and I'm ready to leave. A day of downtime can cost as much as our monthly hosting bill. A month of bad performance is just killing us right now, user and google wise. I'm wondering about running two dedicated boxes for LAMP, one running as the primary Nginx/Apache (proxy pass), and the other as the MySQL box. Running a single box scares the bejesus out of me because who knows how long it will take anyone to fix a raid card or whatever. The idea is to set this up using some sort of failover system using pacemaker and heartbeat. If one server goes down the other can take over for the other running both web and db. There are some good articles over at Linode about this. I have a few DBs that are 1GB+ and would like to load them into memory. Because of this, I'm shying away from a Linode HA setup because for the price I could do it with two dedicated like I described. Am I mad or an idiot? What are people out there doing for pseodu high availability good performance setups under $400/month? I'm a webmaster; I do a lot of things none of it that well :)

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