Week 5

September 27, 2020

  • I've been working quite a lot on my linux-environment project. This is my latest project and has become an Ansible playbook to configure a system based on Fedora Workstation. This project is meant to replace the following older projects:
    • dotfiles - the repo I originally created to manage my evolving vim config after my 2015 internship that I used until the beginning of this year.
    • dev-machine - a lockdown project to reliably build a cloud virtual machine for development use (mostly with the iPad in mind).
    • dev-desktop (archived) - an experiment that proved unfruitful to build immutable images for use on Linux-based desktops and laptops that I use. The idea is that all changes are committed into the playbook and tasks and can be tested against a cloud Fedora VM to ensure they're still valid for a newly imaged system. This way I can continue to use the system without regularly needing to reinstall. I am particularly proud that I've found a way to share my screen in Zoom and share a window in Firefox or Chrome if need be too (using xwayland). I still need to find a good system for syncing (probably manually) .envrc files and other secrets to new machines. This will probably be some hack involving the bitwarden/cli.
  • This week at work has sea-sawed between being guided by the adage "What would Rails do?" and wondering "Why not Rails again?" I've built a layer to allow our application to talk to a database, I think this is well designed now. I also spent significant time implementing things in React&Redux that would have been quicker with server side rendering and progressive enhancement - or in Vue.js. I still don't believe Redux is an ergonomic way to build frontend applications and find it to be a major pain to be honest.
  • 4 years after I first wanted to, I switched my default iOS browser to Firefox. Only to find that it doesn't work as well I'd like.
  • I said goodbye to the late-summer-heatwave and the summer as a whole with a final BBQ. Beyond meat not pictured. 5E5C2292-42B7-4962-A2E5-98B7C6FA1AE4.jpeg
  • I experienced the privilege of being a renter while I waited outside in the pouring rain to allow multiple happy couples look around my house. Some didn't realise that there was only a train line, no garden at the back. 8493F87B-1483-41C4-BD6B-9CB5CDB5A8DA.jpeg
  • I won my first game of Call of Duty Warzone. I didn't kill anyone, did 100 points of damage though so watch out. Here I am in the credits screen with a gun I stole from another player my team mate killed for me. View_recent_photos.png
  • I hauled a suitcase of my flatmates stuff eastwards and got lunch at a place which sold mushroom drinks bought for me in return. I did not have any of the mushroom drinks.
  • If you're reading this while waiting for a bus, it's probably here. 10A5B86C-11D7-4552-A83E-8E5D65C6BE21.jpeg