Its been an exciting and kind of stressful last couple of weeks for me.

I got promoted at work, which has been amazing. I work at MicroK12 and we sell technology to schools. For the last couple of years I have been in our sales department doing inside sales. Now Im our new systems developer working on our internal FileMaker Pro databases and our website.

<This part gets pretty nerdy. Feel free to skip below if you want to avoid some nerdery.>

I have been doing database work for a while now, having developed my own solution to standardize price lists coming into our database. The web, however, is pretty new to me. Besides some basic HTML that I did in middle school Im playing catch-up.

Ive had to learn PHP on the fly (which hasn't been too difficult, really) but the real stress came along when we migrated our systems from FileMaker 11 to 12 the day before our old developer left. We had been working on updating the website to call the new database, but didnt do enough testing before going live. Our web server was running older versions of PHP and Fedora and needed updating (which none of us knew going in) and getting it back online proved to be an ordeal.

So in addition to getting up to speed with how our website is put together I also had to learn some Linux admin skills something that was totally new to me. When everything finally came online I still had several days worth of work fixing the issues that we didnt catch, getting the needed libraries working, etc. Now its all back online and I feel so relieved!

</End nerdery>

On the personal side Ive been really up and down. Lots of cool things have been happening (new job, bowling championship, married to a great woman) but its also been countered with some heartache.

My grandpa died about three weeks ago. By Gods grace Ive never experienced the loss of someone close to me and its been a bit surreal. There were a couple days when I really questioned the point of everything (hint: Jesus is the point) and the Holy Spirit really did some work on my heart. His memorial is tomorrow and Im really not sure what to expect.

I guess I havent figured out what mourning looks like for me. Lately there has been so much going on that I havent really stopped to think about it all. My big hope is that tomorrow can provide some good closure. I know he's with Jesus now and I rejoice since Ill get to see him when I go home.

One last thing. I plan on doing more writing here. Ive already got a new series started that will be rolling out soon hopefully in the next week or so. So keep your eyes peeled here to see what thats all about. I hope it can generate some good discussion.

Thats all for now!