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Long-time No-updates

So it's been ages since I've updated this blog. I've tonnes of blog fodder, but have been focusing on private journalling, due to the often "raw" nature of my thoughts.

I'm not a professional writer, I've tried a lot of things with this blog to keep myself engaged and improve my writing, and I hope that is evident; but also… This blog is primarily by me, for me and journalling just fits that better.

What have I been up to this year?

In no particular order:

  • Attending work as a Technial lead software engineer, where I've had a salary increase and bonus within one year of service.
  • Trying to maintain a 50 repo service, undergoing a product pivot; while improving patterns, fixing bugs and trying to be the best collaborator I can be.
  • Reading voraciously:
    • Three body problem
    • [re-visited] Foundation by Isaac Assimov
    • The Wool Trilogy and Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey
  • Trying to improve the commons by contributing to OpenSource
  • Learning new tools, polishing and developing techniques:
    • Using WSGI and ASGI wrappers to bundle existing python and nodeJS projects for AWS Lambda.
    • [revisiting] Cloud messaging techniques, such as batchItemFailures.
    • Python Monorepo with several projects in a single repository.
    • Python Package management using poetry.
    • [improving] Postman and LucidChart collaboration capacity.
    • Terragrunt, with [fairly fluent already] terraform.
    • Pytest-recording, to coordinate VCR.
    • Pytest auto-table tests from unions, to exhaustively generate test cases for mapping input and output.
    • Jupyter Notebook and adjacent technologies.
    • Github actions, and GitLab for CI, advanced patterns for pipeline and release automation.
    • AWS SSM and multi-account coordination.
    • Justfile
    • Postgrest, and through it yet more Docker edge-cases
  • Teaching, Pairing, Coaching:
    • Agile software delivery.
    • Explaining clean architecture and project structure and organisation.
    • Driver, Navigator.
    • 5 why's incident investigation and response.
    • Agile/Scrum ceremonies.
    • Test-Driven and Fear-Free refactoring and design.

This is a fly over the top, overview. I've also been obsessing over my desk-setup, trying out new games like StarField, technologies around the ARM single-board computing ecosystem, and RISC-V ecosystem; Being a husband, brother, uncle, grandson, son; travelling and experiencing new things.

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