Hello ๐๐ป
I'm Matt Bidewell
A software engineer in London ๐จโ๐ป
Vibe check โ1
2022-10-21
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 stuff๐ค
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 ๐งโ๐ป
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 ๐
- 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 ๐บ
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 ๐
This has been the best NodeJS content book I've read so far and I've read a fair few.
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