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October 2023
I’ve been writing these monthly reviews for a year now. It’s interesting to look back over the last year and see what I’ve achieved. I can also see which project ideas haven’t gotten off the ground yet.
I’ve not had time to write any technical blogs over the last couple of months. That’s not to say I haven’t learnt anything that I could write about. Finding time is proving difficult as I’m transitioning to a new job.
For example, I’ve created a disk usage reporting agent which reports telemetry data back to a central dashboard. There are some cool ideas in that project I could write about, such as:
- the auto detection of the server being an AWS EC2 instance
- using an AWS SQS Queue to pipe the telemetry to the dashboard.
- the Go code I wrote to create an SVG bar chart representing the disk usage.
As I mentioned, I’m moving jobs again. The second time in six months. This is a proper scary time for me. I’d essentially worked for the same employer for twenty three years before these moves.
As I make preparations to move, I need to write a technical handover document for my successor. I also want to leave the team with a blue print for improving their DevOps workflow. Currently there is no DevOps pipeline. I’m working on documenting how to incorporate Github, Codespaces and GitHub Actions to produce a robust and reliable workflow.
Banding
On the 14th we played a concert at St. Andrew’s Church, Penrith in support of the mountain rescue. Had to take a week off playing due to having a cold.
Links
- Better HTTP server routing in Go 1.22
- Build a .NET web app using GitHub Actions
- Demystifying Database Transactions
- Setup Selenium with Python and Chrome Driver on Ubuntu & Debian
- Solving the Engineering Strategy Crisis
- Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework
- sqlcoder an open-source LLM that converts natural language to high-quality SQL queries, making it easy to query data for even complex schemas and questions.
Reading
Still reading Tormod Cockburn’s 1st book in the Mysterious Scotland series The Bone Trap
Listening
Finished listening to Hell Divers book 5 Captives.
I started to listen to a couple of new podcasts. The Curious Cases of Rutherford & Fry is good. I especially like the maths episodes like The Impossible Number and The Problem of Infinite Pi(e)
The presenter, Hannah Fry also has a podcast called Uncharted – Behind every line on a graph, there lies an extraordinary human story.
As I enjoyed the Uncanny podcast, I started giving Two Girls One Ghost a chance.
Watching
By writing down what I watch I can review how much TV I consume. It’s shocking, but here is the list for October: