So I had a minor set back in my personal technology quest. The hard drive on my laptop decided to die. Luckily, most important things are backed up on other computers or on this website. But it got me to thinking about my own personal technology stack.

I was able to determine that the problem was the hard drive. Good thing about laptops being so popular these days is that they are modular and some parts like hard drives are made at a standard size. I picked up a drive 100gig at Best Buy (yeah, I know I could have bought online) for under $200. It was more than double the size of the old one and faster with a 5 year warranty.

Makes me think about the idea of rebuilding your technology stack. Unfortunately, most companies do what I do. They wait for the disaster before they can replace old infrastructure. They don't proactively look for new pieces of infrastructure that can easily fit inside the framework of their operations.

The hard drive crash mean that I had to rebuild my own technology stack. Here are a few things I reloaded: MySQL, Joomla, Java, Net Beans, PHP, Ruby/Rails, Vim, MS Office, work VPN, Norton Anti-virus. I decided to download lighttpd instead of the xitami web server I was using. Lighttpd works with Ruby and PHP and is recommended. Also, I ordered a late release distribution of Linux Mandriva from CheapBytes.com (yes, I know, I could have downloaded it). There were some things I left out from the old installation. I decided not to reload a copy of SQL Server that I had running.

I would have been distraught if I didn't save most of the vital data on my laptop. Instead, I am glad I had a chance to revisit my technology stack. Time enough had past that some of the components in the stack have had time to improve. I feel much better off now than before. It gave me a chance to reevaluate what things were working for me and what things were too cumbersome.

Going forward, I am looking into Ruby on Rails. It's more formal than PHP and less cumbersome than Java/J2EE. I will spend some time getting involved in Pentaho. I will redo the look of my website with Joomla. I may move this blog out to a content management system or maybe the one owned by Google.

Rebuilding a technology stack gives you a chance to restrategize, examine things, and build a better, faster, stronger, more integrated solution.