I’m Still Here!

A year from now you may wish you had started today. – Karen Lamb

Well in true developer fashion, I came up with a great idea and did absolutely nothing with it! Over a year ago I registered this domain and grabbed a barebones site generator and stuck it all up on github. In retrospect I think at that time in my life it was a terrible idea. I had just been let go from my company and was in the process of looking for another one. Fortunately I found one and for the last year I’ve been working there. It’s been a rollercoaster to say the least. But I think this moment in time is as good as any to come back. Even if I just shout into the void and no-one reads it, I want to leave something documented in the aether, something that really captures the way I want to look at technology and the world. So, Let’s get started with a terrible recap of what’s happened to me in the last year. Without further ado, let’s get into it…

New Places, New Tech

As always with new places, there comes a signifcant amount of technical debt and upskilling you have to learn in order to work within the team. Previously, my exposure to server based computing was utilising AWS to deploy a web application; but in the last year I’ve been exposed to Cloud technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Vsphere clusters, Helm, and Terraform to name a few. Let me tell you it’s been a case of diving in the deep end and hoping I can swim. Admittedly, this girl has been surviving until now but I think before long I’m going to need to start dedicating time to learning each of these technologies in greater detail. I do think one of my biggest flaws is that I have such a strong need to know how it all clicks and works together; how each piece of the system was made and how it can be rebuilt, replaced, and broken as needed. I think that Kubernetes is likely a good starting point, and then working my way through to building some clusters in a home lab environment.

So Just What is Next?

One of the biggest sacrifices that did get made though was any semblance of free time. But this summer I really want to change that. I’ve still got my utter love of sustainable programming and I think one of the things I’d like to do this year is work on a project that I would like to use in a day-to-day basis, using sustainable technologies. I’m thinking maybe something like a text editor in another language such as Uxn, or even building a basic Forth/Lisp in Uxn itself. I know people have done things like this before but one of my favourite aspects of computer science is learning how things piece together and how everything works from the ground up.

Seperately from that, I have a strong desire to work on pushing forward with some of the cloud technologies that are widely adopted by the industry. I’ve already covered this above but ideally, a small home lab setup is something that I would be really curious about adopting. Maybe as far as running some small server appliances that would be helpful on my home network (I’m currently thinking a Pi-hole and some metrics to start with).

As with everything that happens in life, this is just some small plans that could potentially come true. I’m sadly an incredibly busy lady and as much as I’d like otherwise, some things just get pushed back over and over again (such as things blog!). But we’re going to change that! I hope in the following weeks I’ll have something creative to post on this site, so stick around and see how it turns out!