Life 👨🏻‍🦰

15 days into my new role at Beamery. It's been a solid start. Lots of onboarding. It's a classic feeling of holy f*ck, I know nothing. I feel both useless and a burden at the same time. However, I need to remember it's normal, I'm new to the team, I'm being onboarded. It takes time.

I'm starting to develop strong opinions over what it means to be onboarded effectively. I should probably consider writing my thoughts. At minimum, I'm a strong believer that pre-recorded meetings where the intention IS NOT onboarding, are not effective ways to onboard engineers. The content should either be bespoke for the onboarding process or should walked through in person.

For example: A recorded meeting where the team attending the meeting have more context, can ask questions is great... if you're in the meeting. The moment you try to use a prerecorded meeting as a onboarding video, you lose the context. Another problem is the meetings are usually of low quality.

But in terms of technical, I'm getting in to the habit of using GCP over AWS. So far it's nice, Cloud Functions and Storage, same as Lambda and S3 in AWS world. Everything feels like the uncanny valley effect.

I was scheduled to do a talk at LNUG! However, had to drop out and reschedule for the next month. Slides are prepped tho

What I've written.. ✍️

• Logging best practices

TV and film 📺

• The last of Us has so far been the best video game TV adaptation I've ever seen. It's heartbreaking and thrilling all at the same time.

• Drive to Survive: Season 5. As a massive F1 fan, I can't get enough of drive to survive, yes a lot of the drama is exaggerated but it still fills that racing void until the first weekend of March.

What I've been reading 📚

• Really interesting read on intercepting a UDP stream in a hotel.

• In the process of reading Software Engineering at Google. It's a fantastic read on the inner workings and practices that are used inside highly effective and functional teams. It's written by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright.

• Finished reading Tracers in the dark by Adam Greenberg. Again I highly recommend, great insight in the dark underworld of cryptocurrency.

• Started reading The Catcher in the Rye. A slight change to the tech books.

Goal catchup

No major changes in goals, most of my time was spent with the whirlwind of changing jobs.

• Health Improvements
  • Weight loss:
    • Current weight: 252lbs
    • Target of 210lbs
  • Running:
    • Current Distance: 80km
    • Target Distance: 500km