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I had a good chat with my boss today. I'm abdicating from all backend dev support and focusing exclusively on devops work now. I don't think devops work is perfect for me, but at least I can approach it from a learning perspective instead of getting stuck in development hell. Speaking of development hell, I see that our tech lead finally found a way to sneak Ruby on Rails into the tech stack. He tried it before - multiple times now, and has repeatedly been greated with resistance from the rest of the development team, but I can see he's taken an approach of "try, try, try again" until someone doesn't notice or just gives up. Last time he tried to sneak it into a Ruby Sinatra application by mounting the Sinatra app on top of Rails as an engine. There was no Rails stuff to speak of; this was just an ass-backward way of delivering a web application and trying to sideload his pet framework despite overwhelming hostility within the organization toward it.
At least I don't have to directly work *in* that code now; but I'll still shudder every time I have to do some devops task that interacts with it. Ugh. I enumerated on Mastodon a few big misses in what's going on at work. For technology:
- Ruby
- Rails (now, apparently)
- Apple hardware
- Amazon Web Services
- Kubernetes
- Slack
And there are other non-tech issues going on now too. I talked with my manager about these; so hopefully there is positive movement soon; but it won't be immediate, and I understand that.
- No autonomy
- Too many priorities
- Participating on multiple teams (This is now resolved!)
- Personality conflicts (At least partially due to my mental state - partially being addressed)
So what would I choose for tech if I had a choice?
- Go
- Linux or *BSD
- IRC
If you want to view web dev as "How do I horizontally scale these services" where all software is commodified and everything is hosted off premises in the cloud, then sure, Kubernetes is probably the tool I'd use for that. But I dislike that entire philosophy. I think all computing should be edge computing, with the ability to opt into some light server-side processing for synchronizing payments and possibly orchestrating encrypted data across multiple devices. And all client side software should not ever be connected to a web browser and possibly not even be HTTP and possibly not even TCP/IP. Given the right circumstances, I may even explore this myself; but there are definitely some hurdles in the way of that.
Man, Andy at C41 at Lonsdale Quay; what a guy! He lent me an origami brewer last week, and this week he lent me a Kalita Wave brewer. I've got to say, I think the Origami is overrated. Granted, I only had the brewer itself, and not the extra piece it needs to sit atop a mug properly; but in my defense, I cannot tell if that piece must be purchased separately or not. Nevertheless, the first brew I did with it was "ruined" because the conical filter sat too low in the mug and soaked in the resulting coffee! Ridiculous! OK, so I also have to admit that I didn't fully test out the Origami brewer the way I would have liked to, because I didn't have any Kalita Wave papers. One of the big draws of the Origami is that you can brew conical style filters in it (ie., V60) or the Kalita Wave filters. Perhaps using the Wave filters and have the "sit atop" attachment make it a truly astounding brewer; but at that point we are ignoring half of the draw (conical filters) and we're looking quite pricey (more than the Kalita Wave or Hario V60). Further, I *suspect* you could just as easily drop a Wave filter into a V60 and get similar results. The filter will probably sit higher in the V60 than the Origami, but other than aesthetics I don't think that would have an impact. So yeah, I think the Origami has great looks and is otherwise a fine brewer with some drawbacks that doesn't entice me away from the V60.
As I mentioned above, Andy also lent me a Kalita Wave brewer. It's a white ceramic model of the smaller size, designed to serve 1-2 cups. It's notably smaller than my Hario V60, which I think is the #02 size. Well, I suspect I've been primed for a while now to like the Kalita Wave, but boy do I like the Kalita Wave. I find it very aesthetically appealing. I love the way the filters sit in the brewer and the way the coffee looks as it's being prepped and brewed in the filter. I love the taste of the coffee as it comes out; it seems to have a little more sweetness than the V60, and it seems to require a little less fuss to brew well than the V60, too. I first heard about the Kalita Wave around 2018, so I think I expected it to be good. I'm sure that's playing into my opinions here; but the results and my subjective experience of it seems to support that high expectation. I daresay, I would like to buy one and I would use it instead of my V60.
I've been watching a decent amount of Mr. Robot. I'm just starting season 3 now, and I find that surprising! I found Season 1 to be a little meandering. It started out super strong, and it kind of lost me in the middle; but it picked up a bit at the end just enough for me to start watching Season 2. I feel like Season 2 was *way* more interesting than Season 1. It really played with the unreliable narrator in a way I didn't expect, and that was surprising even after the reveal in Season 1 (which wasn't too surprising, but was still well done). It starts exploring what happens after society collapses and really just goes places I didn't expect. It also gets dark, but not dark in the same way that Season 1 did. In some ways more dark, in some ways maybe not so much. Similar but different. I think I liked it quite a bit - it was not what I was expecting. I have no idea what to expect for Season 3. Angela is definitely th emost interesting character so far.
I started learning Croatian via Drops. I was studying it a bit before via Mondly, but apparently that app is attrocious for privacy settings. To be honest, I'm not really sure how good Drops is in that regard; but it's different and feels a little more like Duolingo did; so I'm liking it so far. The biggest issue is that they are heavily tied into the Google Play payments system, so the in app purchase stuff is completely broken with microG. I wouldn't necessarily pay for it at this point; but since it doesn't seem to function at all in that regard, I definitely won't pay for it. Anyway, I had been studying Norwegian last year and made it a good 200 days or so (with only a minor ~3 day break in the middle) before I stopped. I really wanted to pick up a language again, and came back to the usual conundrum: Which language should I learn? Norwegian was motivated twofold: I had purchased a Norwegian language book many years ago before University and had studied it a little. The other one is the Scandinavian heritage in my family and the desire to learn a Scandinavian language for personal cultural reasons. That's a good motivation, and I would maybe have chosen it again; but I just don't know anybody else directly who speaks it. My brother was learning Swedish when I was learning Norwegian; so we potentially could have communicated; but they are different languages and I'm sure that wouldn't have been seemless. Other standard options are: Spanish, French, Chinese. Spanish for being so widely spoken (and I developed some comprehension and ability to speak a number of years ago), French because it's the other official language in Canada and I know a couple of French speakers. (And also have a history of minor comprehension and speaking.) Chinese is very similar to Spanish in that it is widely spoken around the world; but with the added incentive of there being a lot of Chinese speakers in Vancouver, and we have several Chinese neighbours. Ultimately I decided on Croatian because my wife and her family are croatian, so it has the personal cultural sway of Norwegian; and because my wife and her family speak Croatian, so I can reinforce it by speaking/learning with them.
This isn't a wrap-up of any of the threads above, rather this is the end of my day before I head off to bed. I've been wondering when a good time for writing would be. In my gut it feels like it ought to come in the evening time; but I typically spend a good deal of time stretching in the evening. On Friday I managed to write frequently throughout the day, but I think in general that won't be possible to pull off. Today I did the writing right at the end of the work day before my wife came home, and today she came home later than usual without kids and I didn't have to prep supper. So I guess it remains a mystery. I do think I can take the 'ol Lenovo 14w and hack away on that while sitting on the couch and wifey watches TV.
Then, of course, there's the craft of writing itself. The act of writing is fine and dandy, and that's what I'm hoping to hone with these journals; but my ultimate goal is to do creative writing. I don't even know what that writing will be; poetry, short stories, novels - I'm game for whatever fits my fancy. But I won't know what works until I try, and it's more productive to iterate on shorter pieces; so I will probably dabble in short stories and poems to develop some amount of skill. Beyond that there's all kinds of information on how to structure a story, how to develop characters, how to develop conflict and setting and all of that. @josias@theres.life has suggested a few such books to read, and I'm grateful for that. I'm curious to partake, but there's also a delicate balance to manage between learning about something and actually doing something. Plus, I find I typically learn best by doing. Still, there's no harm in trying, learning by doing, then augmenting with a little intellectual pursuit. As everything in life tends to go, things are rarely, if ever, all or nothing.
OK, time for a little brainstorming here. I enjoy sci-fi the most out of any genre work; so that's the obvious go to. I love programming and I like retro computers. I like restoring computers. I've historically been drawn to very intellectual stuff, lots of introspection and grandiose thinking; but lately I've largely gone back against that. I'm drawn moreso to mainstream appeal now, appreciating what it takes to achieve mainstream appeal while also communicating something meaningful. The former attempts to communicate something meaningful with no sensibilities to the audience; while the latter is concerned significantly with the audience; but not to the complete neglect of a meaningful message. I think that's interesting. It seems to follow from my thinking on iteration and systems instead of goals. Set direction with systems and work in small incremental pieces over a medium to long period of time to achieve good results. Not necessarily exactly what your goals are, but something in the same "direction" as your goals; and maybe even more of what you were hoping for anyway! Hmm. I think there's plenty to get started with in this dump. At least for developing the themes of a story and starting to think about the conflict and possibly characters. OK, yeah, I should probably read up on the art form a bit because I have almost no bearings. :-)
Good night and take care! Thanks for reading!
Published on June 07, 2021