Inspired by Matt Gaunt-Seo's Vibe check series, I've decided to start my own. The purpose is to get into a habit of reflection and writing, which conveniently go hand in hand.

Techy stuff🤖

• Life at Government Digital Services (GDS) is good. My primary focus is in the space of Digitial Identity.

• I organise the monthly #NodeJS Community Meetup, where we talk about all things NodeJS.

• It's good experience to see how a large team like GDS uses NodeJS and as we introduce it to more backend areas, how can we improve and help each other.

• One philosophy I love here is that we code in the open. Everything we have worked on is located at the GDS Github account.

• I'm getting my hands dirty in the event-driven, serverless world as well.

• The AWS SAM CLI is great and using it in conjunction with a monorepo to deploy serverless architecture is a breeze.

• A great person to follow in this space is Paul Johnston.

• Tip when using the SAM CLI to build the code you should not use the -t with deploy/package. sam build will generate a new template file in the .aws-sam directory which is then the default location for future commands.

• Came across a render issue with Webkit based browsers and raised a bug with Apple

Life 🧑‍💻

• Re-finding my love for running. It's therapeutic to just go for a run it's almost like clearing out a memory cache.

• I'm back to recording my runs back in Strava.

From the webs 🌍

• A list of 100k most used passwords - Ever thought to yourself what weird passwords are commonly used, here's a list.
• Random accessible colour pairs generator - Useful if you're designing a site and want to get a pair of colours that are accessible.
• SHA-256 what? - Beautiful site that details step by step what happens when you SHA256 a string.

TV shows 📺

SheHulk

Loved it. The execution of the overall plot was great, I look forward to the future of the Marvel world if this continues.

Rings of Power

I was addicted to this from the start. As a massive fan of Tolkien's works, I entered this with a sceptical eye. But after the first few episodes, I loved it. The world-building is exactly what I've been missing from my life at the moment.

Killing Eve

I never got around to watching this initially, but over the past few months I've been catching up with one or two episodes a week. It's amazing. The chemistry between Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer is incredible.

Books 📚

NodeJS design Patterns

This has been the best NodeJS content book I've read so far and I've read a fair few.

Sandworm

I find investigative journalism in the tech world interesting, especially around cybercrime from state actors. If that sounds interesting then check out Count down to zero day by Kim Zetter