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Notes from the Week #24

29 Jun 2019

weeknotes gds

Goodbye, Q1 2019! We wrapped up this quarter and next week is Firebreak.

Me, presenting at the Firebreak Show & Tell (probably)

I’ve put an idea on the board to pitch on Monday, but we’ll see how many other people are interested.

On the reverse, I’ve fallen victim to the “summer cold” that’s going around, which sucks. Oh well, you can’t have everything!

Work

  • The quarter’s wrapped up and I managed to get the bit of work I had picked up merged - still getting used to a pull-request workflow, although a helpful discussion with my line manager pointed out that the way we do pull-requests enables us to deploy more often than if we were doing trunk-based development because of compliance requirements.

  • Speaking of which, I found myself succumbing to the siren-song of working too long in an isolated branch. I was fed back that it was useful having my PR split up into several smaller commits but I could’ve requested a merge earlier and split the work up rather than at the end.

  • I’m enjoying using LocalStack to run integration tests against AWS rather than faffing around with a real account.

  • Did my first lightning talk, about “Test-Commit-Revert”. It … went well? I got some positive feedback and interest in something like a workshop in future, although it’s hard work to ignore the internal sense of “This is terrible, and everyone is thinking it’s terrible.”

  • I took part in a kata workshop as part of the Java community of practice, which was good fun - pairing with new people is a good opportunity for a learning experience, and I think both myself and my pair partner took something helpful away from it.

Other stuff

  • I showed my face at SPA 2019 to take part in the post-conference diversions - I wrote a whole post about it here, and it rekindled my desire to get back into the conference scene.

  • I’ve noticed ByteMonkey, my jvm failure-injection agent, getting a few more stars recently - it’s apparently been included on a list of awesome-chaos-engineering tools, which is nice!

  • I realised that while I was out as bisexual to a few close friends at my previous workplace, I’ve now got a lot more opportunities to be open about that part of myself - just the existence of a network is a totally new experience for me, and I’m excited about it.

  • I’m having a spike and experiment with Clojure, after having a thought that Test-Commit-Revert might work better in a LISP, being close to it’s original model of propagating AST changes rather than text diffs

Reading