One of the great things about working for Escape Technology is the wealth of knowledge you find in the staff here.
Sat at my desk this morning I decided it was about time I learnt a little more about the marvel that is Secure Shell (SSH) access. But where to start? There are plenty of blogs and resources online, but we have something more powerful. More direct. More… Tim.
Tim Harcourt is our Senior Systems Engineer and resident droll comedian. He knows more about servers, file systems, and the control thereof than anyone I’ve ever met. So naturally he was a logical person to turn to and say “can I borrow your brain?”
Half an hour later and he’d taught me more about rsync in SSH that I could have learnt on any blog – wonderful though blogs are. The benefit of having an actual human to talk to will never be replaced by online tutorials. Especially when their knowledge is so wide ranging as Tim’s.
In that short 30 minutes he managed to change my development workflow so I stopped wasting time duplicating information and transferring files to our live website from our development website.
I’m a firm believer in continual learning. The minute I stop learning things is the minute I cease to be. So finding out ways to optimise my time and the development cycle of a website is amazingly useful for my day to day work.
Tim saved me a full half day by spending that short period of time at my desk. So I can only guess at how much time he saves our clients by imparting his considerable wisdom.
This blog post has been brought to you by gleeful adoration and a little worship. I’m now going to rsync my modified css to the live site. Which is a much easier way to do it that copying the files manually. Duh.
Cheers, Tim!