Life 👨🏻‍🦰

A Late Vibe check!

Generally I'm feeling pretty good, I'm in the process of narrowing down some issues my body has. Turns out, I'm allergic to fish (or at least something fishy), cutting it out is easier said than done, I love my sushsi . My general health is improving, slowly but I feel great! Something is still wrong at the core, but we live.

The TLDR of my health is my blood pressure is extreamly high. As a result I need to drastically make some life changes to bring that down. So far in the past month, I've managed to bring my average down into the pre-high zone, but just moving more, eating protein heavy meals and cutting booze out!

I was running a lot more and I'm starting to see some improvements in my times but then I took an arrow to the knee managed to injure my calf, I'm out till at least the end of the month (23/05). I'm still a long way off my target of 500km for the year, but I'm hoping to make up some ground over the summer.

Work is going great, passed probation and I feel part of a strong norming team. A lot of my work is still in GCP and is getting a handle on our fairly large tech debt. I still feel 'useless' at times, but that's natural, I guess. We did a hackathon as well, which was great, the theme was AI and specifically LLMs (Large language Modals).

F*cking hayfever season. It's coming. It's here. It feels like its been a late start to the hayfever season in London. Anyway this has been May. Bring on June.

What's been overloading my senses 📺

Wow, I've slept on Succession! This is a great TV show about a family of billionaires and their media empire. It's a bit like a modern day Game of Thrones, but with less dragons and more backstabbing. I'm only a few episodes in, but I'm really enjoying it so far.

Check out this video on an engineer deleting the production database at Gitlab. It's a great example of how to handle a crisis, and how to learn from your mistakes.

I read! 📚

Prime video reduces costs by ditching Serverless Really interesting read here on Prime Video's move away from serverless. I've been a big fan of serverless for a while, but I've always been a bit skeptical of it's use in high throughput, low latency applications. This article is a great example of how serverless can be used to get a product off the ground, and then how it can be replaced with a more traditional architecture as the product matures. Its worth remembering that this is probably a small instance of a much larger system, and that serverless is still used in other parts of the system.

Finished Catcher in the rye. That was a hard read. Difficult? no. Just incredibly boring, in my opinion. It felt like such a bore to get through it, I nearly gave up multiple times. I'm happy now that I finally got to the end and can start thinking about whats next.