Author: Joel Gross

Joel Gross is the CEO of Coalition Technologies.

Competitor Research

A crucial business technique is to research what your competitors are doing to find good ideas you can use in your business. Sam Walton did this heavily as he built Walmart and wrote about it extensively in his autobiography. He would visit other retail stores and talk to their employees daily. The best ideas he found he would bring back to his own business.… read more “Competitor Research”

System Administration

I really had a lot of fun last night working on administering my Linux server where my recruiting site is hosted. I had been having a problem where applicants who went to upload large Youtube video files would cause the server to run out of memory then the upload would fail. I cleaned up the server and moved it to a much larger AWS instance and that has helped.… read more “System Administration”

Nginx

All weekend I have been working on a very challenging bug. I have Apache2 set up to reverse proxy my nginx server for the CT jobs site and everything seems to work okay except very large file uploads for the Youtube videos. Videos over 150 MB end up getting this weird error cast back. I have not yet figured it out.

Running

I read an interesting article in the New York Times before bed last night that said they tested lab rodents to compare neurogenesis (new brain cell creation) when you do endurance exercise vs high intensity interval training vs weight lifting vs doing nothing. They found that you generate the most new brain cells when you do endurance activities and the more you do, the more your brain grows.

Negative & Positive Reviews of My Performance as CEO

One of the “perks” of being a CEO is that people review your performance… publicly. I think most people would feel embarrassed by public performance reviews even if they are positive. I am sure most people would feel quite frustrated if a negative performance review came to light, and probably be downright livid if false negative performance reviews existed out there.… read more “Negative & Positive Reviews of My Performance as CEO”

Family

When I was in my early twenties, my top priority was having fun and hanging out with friends. In my late twenties, my top priority was building Coalition. As I’ve begun my thirties, my family has become my top priority. I still spend most of my time working on Coalition though, but I now do it for my family.

Extinction book series

I have been reading the Extinction book series at Laurel’s recommendation. It is a strange mix…. flat characters that are way over the top, and constant cheesy action that somehow keeps you in suspense and reading through them. Exhausting lol. I need to switch back to nonfiction again soon.