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What's New?

• Personal • 374 words • 2 minutes to read

Sometimes I’m working on my site so much, that I don’t stop to realize that I haven’t posted anything in a while. I think we all do that, but here’s a bit of what’s been going on lately:

Tarzan 1.2: I’ve been very hard at work on the next Tarzan release. This release will be everything I’d hoped the last release would be, before I realized it was a bit too ambitious. Rather than talk about the things I want to do, there are a few things that are already done and in the bag.

  1. A significantly improved caching system. This sucker flies!
  2. Improved image processing functionality. Supports multiple output formats among other things.
  3. Custom Descriptions for products. You can overwrite Amazon’s default values, or even use your own custom images for products.
  4. A much improved Control Panel. Nearly everything can be tweaked from the web interface.
  5. iTunes Music Store integration for CD tracklistings.

Very cool stuff, and I’ve still got more that I’m working on. Tarzan 1.2 will be awesome!

Skyzyx.com, v22: The redesign that I promised over a year ago is underway. I’ve switched to WordPress, and am in the process of fixing things that were broken in Movable Type. I’m working on a fresh clean design, and am frantically studying HTACCESS redirects.

Buying a house: My wife and I are looking to buy our first place. I’ve realized that Bay Area housing costs are absolutely ridiculous! We’re looking at buying a 1500 sq. ft. townhouse, 3 bedroom, 2 bath, for $500k… and that’s a good deal. In the small town of Sanger where I grew up, a place like that would go for a whopping $150k. Anyways, we put a bid on the place, and just got a counter-offer last night. Let’s hope that everything goes through!

New baby on the way: I didn’t want to mention this publically when we first found out, because you never know what might happen at early stages of pregnancy, but then I forgot to say anything once we were relatively in-the-clear. My wife and I are expecting a baby boy in June! It’s very exciting, but very nerve-racking at the same time.

Anyways, lots of stuff. So, what’s going on for you these days?

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.