Life 👨🏻‍🦰

Hopefully had my last hospital appointment for a while. Had a string of problems that have hindered my efforts on my health. It's made me revaluate a lot of things, I need to be healthier, happier.

As for work I've been into a lot of the gritty world of Beamery Integrations. It's complex, mysterious piece of work that can do with some TLC. I can really see my personal growth in these situations compared to myself 2/3 years ago. I have the confidence to say something architecturally looks wrong.

Here it's serverless that just isn't quite done right. Some things missing here and there. Spagheti architecture. Lost domain knowledge. It's an exciting fun challenge to get into the weeds of it and start looking at ways to rip it out and put it back together but with stability and structure.

On a personal coding side I've been playing around with the ChatGPT APIs. I've also been taking a deeper dive into Terraform and reading Terraform: Up and running.

What I've been watching 📺

After the Virgin Internet outage of 4th April, watch this video on by Hussein Nasser The Virgin Media ISP outage.

I've also been looking at getting my life more 'organised'. Specifically I've found Ali Abdall's videos on Notion and organisational research really interesting. As a result I've completely revamped the way I use notion and started using it as a 'second brain'.

• Second brain
• Second brain by Ali Abdall

What I've been reading 📚

Cracking on with multiple books

• The Catcher in the Rye

  Finished, a different pace to technical books, but I've enjoyed it.

• Terraform: Up and running.

  Finally getting around to update my Terraform knowledge. I'm learning a lot, quickly. At a cost 😭. Thanks AWS.

• Software Engineering at Google

  This book isnt something you need to read cover to cover, instead it's something you reference. Lots to learn. I find it interesting to see how places I've worked have attempted to (and failed) to implement some of the points from the book.

• Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques

  Part of my role in Beamery I've been pushing for better documentation and diagramming. One problem we currently have in my small team is a lack of up to date and relevant documentation, scattered across different knowledge bases that hard to maintain. My experience at GOV.UK has inspired me to brush up on the Mermaid.js.

What I've written.. ✍️

• RFCs and the importance of technical documentation. I've dropped my thoughts on using RFCs as you scale from startup to a larger company.

Goal catchup

Right now I'm happy to be feeling much better, that I have been.. well.. in a long time. I'm still not 100% but I'm getting there.