I didn’t have any significant difficulties with Lab 1.  For the most part I thought it was fairly trivial.  No offense to those who struggled.  I’ve been building web applications professionally for years and I’ve been using Linux as my desktop OS exclusively for almost 5 years.  The lab was still beneficial though and I like how this class has been put together.  I’ve written about a few of the things I thought were beneficial below.

EC2 -  I’ve wanted to play with EC2 for a while but haven’t had a good excuse to actually do so.  This class has given me the excuse and how I’ve got all kinds of crazy ideas swirling in my head about what I could do with it.  I still don’t feel comfortable with using EC2 to host a production web site (because of the cost and because of the fact that a node can down at any time.)  It can still very powerful and can be used for plenty of other things though and has a lot of potential.

As a side note, I really like that EC2 uses public key authentication so much.  This a technology that I think goes underutilized in our industry.

CGI – I haven’t used CGI for years.  I had forgotten how simple it is.  In spite of it’s simplicity you can do a lot of really powerful things with it.  It was good to dust of my old CGI skills and look back on some of the PHP hacks I’ve put together in the past and realize that I would have been better off using CGI and a Bash script.

The rest of the class should be fun.  I’m looking forward to hitting refresh on the load balancer and watching everyone’s different pages come up with each request.