Today is the day where I exit my twenties and enter my thirties.
This is the first birthday in 6 years that I’m celebrating in Perth.
It’s also the first birthday where I’ve taken the day off work. I’ve been putting in some long hours at work since we moved to Perth in December, so I’m making an effort to improve the work-life balance 🙂
In July 2008, I moved to Melbourne with a plan on staying for approximately 12 months.
It turns out I was completely wrong about that time frame, because after more than 5 years, I’m still here!
Quite simply, Melbourne has been amazing. I’ve had the time of my life.
Melbourne’s food, bar and sporting culture have been highlights. On the other hand, Melbourne’s weather has not been a highlight!
I’ve met some great friends, and explored some beautiful places.
I’ve bought a house in Melbourne.
I’ve also been really impressed by Melbourne’s tech community. In particular, being a part of the WordPress Melbourne User Group.
But best of all, I’ve been lucky enough to meet the love of my life, Jen.
After many discussions, Jen and I have decided to move to Perth.
In 36 hours time, Jen and I will be leaving Melbourne and starting our huge road trip to the other side of Australia.
Here’s the 3700km plan:
We’ll be taking our time on this journey – there’s plenty of sightseeing to be done along the way!
The trip even includes a short ferry ride across the Murray River!
We’re both really excited about starting the next chapter of our lives in Perth.
I’m looking forward to being closer to my family and long-time friends, and being surrounded by amazing beaches.
I’m also excited about being in the same office as my business partner and colleagues.
Melbourne, I will miss you. But you never know – we may even be back some day!
In August 2012, Rackspace announced that they were working on launching an Australian datacentre for their cloud offerings.
Today that dream is a reality, with the official announcement of their new Sydney-based datacentre:
Rackspace AUS Cloud is now available! Celebrate and learn more by joining our virtual event starting at 10am AEST: http://t.co/lAXChUSX45
— Rackspace ANZ (@RackspaceANZ) June 16, 2013
Rackspace now have datacentres in 9 locations, including Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, and the USA.
I just logged into the Rackspace Control Panel, and here’s the proof:
I’ve invested many hours in AWS’ offerings, so I’m not planning on switching to Rackspace Cloud any time soon, but it is great to see more competition in the Australian-based cloud industry.
Big news this morning:
Amazon Web Services has just launched an AWS region in Sydney, Australia!
The new Asia Pacific (Sydney) region supports almost all of AWS’ services including EC2, RDS, S3 and many more.
After launching an Australian Edge Location in June 2012 for Route 53 and CloudFront, I (along with many other Australian developers) have been waiting for AWS to launch a fully-fledged Australian region.
Whilst there are already some Australian-specific Cloud Computing offerings, this is a big day for us now that the AWS juggernaut has launched here.
Rackspace (another large cloud computing provider) has previously committed to launching a Syndey-based datacentre in 2012, however we are yet to see that launch.
Overall, I think that more competition in the Australian cloud industry can only be a good thing for us. It’s likely to help drive down the high costs of Australia’s high bandwidth/data.
Onwards and upwards!
Last weekend I attended WordCamp Sydney 2012 at the beautiful University of Sydney Camperdown campus:
There were approximately 230 people who attended the 2 day event. (Which makes WordCamp Sydney 2012 the biggest Australian WordCamp ever!)
According to Eventifier, there were:
In previous WordCamps that I’ve attended, the number of WordPress end-users have easily outnumbered the number of WordPress developers. However at WordCamp Sydney, the developer stream was packed, and there were (from memory) more developers than end-users.
I particularly enjoyed Brent Shepherd’s Word to the Future presentation, and also Jeff Waugh’s TurboPress: The High Performance Guide to WordPress.
The major highlight for me was the conversations at the pub on the Saturday night. It was great to see so many passionate WordPress business owners discussing their problems, solutions, and even talking about future WordPress-related events in Australia.
I also enjoyed catching up with some familiar WordPress faces, and also meeting some really interesting people.
Being one of the organisers of WordCamp Melbourne 2011, it was fantastic to see WordCamp popularity in Australia continue to rise.
Thank you to all the organisers and volunteers – from my point of view the the event ran without a hitch!
Bring on the next Australian WordCamp 🙂
In case you missed it, WordPress 3.3 was released this morning.
What’s new you may ask? The best way to find that out is to visit the new About WordPress screen in the dashboard
Since I started blogging (semi?) regularly, I’ve felt the need to have somewhere to upload the random photos I take in my day-to-day life.
I didn’t want to clog this technical blog with a heap of photos, so I’ve set up a separate photoblog website: photos.jamesc.id.au.
I’ll be using the new site to explore my interests in photography.
If you’re interested, please take a look 🙂
Today (11 March) is my 27th birthday.
It seems that announcing 27th birthdays on your blog is a cool thing to do these days, so I’ve decided to do the same.
After 8 months of development WordPress 3.1 has just been released.
Update 24 February 2011: WordPress 3.1 has now been released
According to Andrew Nacin, WordPress 3.1 is going to be released in 23rd February 2011 in the AM (US time):
Fingers crossed 🙂