My brain feels fried after a week of intense kick-offs for the new quarter, but it’s been a largely good and productive fortnight since the last note.
Work
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Week before last was Firebreak, which was sweet, I chipped in with some other groups’ projects, such as moving jobs from an old Jenkins instance to our more modern Concourse CI setup.
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Most of my time was spent figuring out how we can gradually pull one of our private code-bases into the open. Some repos are private for entirely legitimate reasons, but “closed-source-ness” is viral - it’s hard work auditing history to pull stuff out than just leaving it closed.
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I have a reckon that most private code-bases are principally composed of code that could be public, with the remnant being ‘secret sauce’.
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It feels like I’m getting into the swing of things. It’s been just over 6 weeks since I started at GDS, and being present for the start of the quarter makes a huge difference. Our team is seriously multi-disciplinary this quarter, and we’ve got some fun discovery work coming up. I’m looking forward to what I can learn from my new team-mates.
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I super enjoy refactoring - I find it really easy to get into flow when I’m slowly and methodically gardening some code. I catch myself practicing “pseudo-TCR” when I do my refactorings, running the tests after each modification and trying to make the changes as small as possible.
Other stuff
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I went to Extreme Tuesday Club for a session run by Benji on why developers reject extreme programming practices and techniques. Super interesting discussion, and reminded me of conversations we had in Shift about trying to enact change. I tried to make the point that a lot of people push back for personal reasons, not technical ones, and very often the “facts don’t matter”.
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This inspired me to put forward an idea for the next session at XTC (next Tuesday!) on Mental Health in Software Development which I was lucky to have both pitched and had voted the winner. I’m nervous and excited about this session - I’ve started trying to use my platform (Twitter, tech) to start conversations about topics like mental health in our space, and I’m grateful for this opportunity.
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I have so many ideas for things I want to build during personal time, but my brain is mostly swiss-cheese by the time I get home. I need to set myself a bit of time at the weekends to get in the zone a bit more, so I’ve ordered myself a proper desk to put in the spare room - I love my living room, but it’s just not the environment I can properly get my head down in.
- I finally moved my tomato plants from their pots into a larger container. Once they’ve grown up big and strong, I’ll get some cane for them to grow around. Can’t wait to taste those fresh summer tomatoes! I also discovered that I love the smell of compost, it reminds me of my parents’ garden back home.
Reading/Watching
- Limmy plays American Truck Simulator
- Stranger Things
- How Dark deploys code in 50ms
- The British Banking Dynasty That’s Even Older Than the Rothschilds