Week - 08-01-2020

It's been a week of ups and downs. On the upside, it was Christmas which means I ate alot! That's always something that makes me happy. In addition I got out of the house after 2 weeks of working from home over the Christmas period. This doesn't mean I was sat on my bum for 2 weeks, although fairly accurate.

On the downside, it was back to work with a bang. The less said about that the better.

Work

I say it was back to work with a bang, it hasn't been that bad. We are ramping up the busiest and most critical times of the year for our systems, which causes stress for our users.

I have been working on a SQL promotion mechanism that will loop over a bunch of SQL files that need to be promoted to other environments in our stack, copy these statements to the necessary targets and then execute them to make the changes live. All whilst keeping a history and a log of what has changed. I've written it all in PowerShell for simplicity and speed in developing, which has been a blast from the past as I haven't done much PowerShell since my MSP days. In the future I will integrate this with GitHub, we don't use GitHub for a bunch of our stuff - which is something I need to change.

Other than that, I have a fairly large server OS upgrade project ongoing. This involves many spinning plates (probably literally) and a bunch of legacy software which is an absolute nightmare. It's been an interesting project to deliver with little to no documentation of the existing systems. I would say it was great fun doing the discovery and producing documentation from scratch on a production service, but I would be lying.

Study

I am still studying CS50, more on why another time. I've been working through the lectures, shorts and psets for a few months and and when I can get around to it. I am currently working on the runoff pset, which seems to be a fairly interesting exercise in simulating the results of a runoff style election. There are lots of loops involved in this, in some cases it has been a good exercise in not overcomplicating things.

Play

New Year, New Me? Probably not but I have made it my mission to try and do more Park Runs this year. I am on a 100% record so far.. we will see how long that lasts.

As an incentive to do more exercise I did buy the new Apple Watch - that's what I told the wife. The truth is I have wanted one for a while. I've always been a bit of a stat nerd so with this I am getting stats for running, hiking, resting, sleeping... the list goes on. So far I am liking it, its a nice bit of kit, I especially like that it unlocks my mac automatically for me. Magicary at its finest! There are some areas where it isn't as good as the fitbit it replaced. It doesn't constantly track heart rate, the battery is desire in comparison and so is the ability to see all your stats in one place. There are too many screens to scroll through to get the actual stats you want. Maybe there is a way to get this personalised consolidated view, I haven't found it yet.

- Joke

Don’t use “beef stew” as a computer password. It’s not stroganoff.

- Podcast

I picked up a tip off on this podcast from somewhere I can't remember. Its called Command Line Heroes, its produced by Red Hat and offers a really interesting insight into the history of some of computings milestones. So far I have listened to the episodes about the OS Wars, which offered some great stories from inside the camps at Apple and Microsoft during those early years. It also documents the rise of Linux and how the giants Apple and Microsoft tried to deal with that and Open Source computing. It's well worth your time, if your into that sort of thing.

Thats about it for this week, logging out...