Settling in and developing myself
Status Report
The new job has been fruitful, exciting and engaging work with a good company and coworkers. Going into the office is a definite adjustment, but some days I get in a satisfying amount of work there. Getting to work on some nicely put together, mature systems is a great experience. Work plus trips to South Dakota and Chicago recently have left me wiped, and July should be a chill month in response.
Some work/DevOps milestones
- Running my first prod-impacting Terraform at the new gig, then running more and more, more and more comfortably.
- Developing my Terraform skills around dynamic blocks and locals in rendering parts of modules optional (in retrospect I could've used optional object type constraints and I should poke around those some but it's good practice as dynamic blocks are very powerful and useful.)
- Learning more Golang including the surprisingly tricky implementation of checking for the first weekday of the month and if the current date is the same for sake of timing script runs.
- Worked on AWS Backup notifications which I should blog about elsewhere, getting some familiarity with the service along with integrating SNS, Lambda and Slack as well as introducing myself to the Serverless Framework(which I like better than managing Lambdas in Terraform, though there are tradeoffs.)
- Added some gists/made some gists public, like clearing unfinished AWS Backup Jobs and a demonstration of the optional dynamic TF
A personal project
- Set up a blog with Hugo, Netlify and Decap CMS, a foray into static sites with headless CMS. Getting it up and running being unfamiliar with all except for hosting some stuff on Netlify was interesting and I recognize why so many people still just use Wordpress for various reasons -- 'ease' of use, broader dev community and docs, more people you can pay to do it for you, among other reasons. I might put up something Wordpress, run the LAMP stack somewhere soon, see how tight I can get it. For now, I'm happy with the blog and the Discord bot I made for users(friends) to publish posts to it via. file upload and pulling from Google Docs(as Netlify Identity has a 5 user cap for its admin panel I wanted to get around) came out. Did get Slash Commands working on Discord, only took me years of avoiding them! (Hey, prefixed commands worked just fine.)
Future projects
- I'd really like to refine and get out a proper post about my EC2 Image Builder automation, that's been close to the finish line for a while and it's an obscure service that someone might benefit from more info about.
- In general, as ever, reminding myself to take more notes, code in public, ask for feedback and code aloud. Especially to take more notes.