Daily-Rambles on Matt Ellis

Fighting the frontend demons

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 23:39:30 +0100

So project Pineapple has been making some progress, I’ve got what I think is an acceptable MVP, with the basic functionality working as expected. One thing I’ve found with doing this project is how much I hate doing frontend work, and how much it drains my excitement to develop my side projects.

I had a plan in mind to combat this, one of which is obvious the other not so much. First and foremost, stop the need for making everything perfect. I can’t stress enough how much time I sank into trying to make something look perfect on the page, be it size of buttons or positioning (my worst nightmare). This is a given but apparently my brain doesn’t work rationally 😶‍🌫️.

Project Pineapple updates, part 2

Thu, 20 Jul 2023 17:06:26 +0300

So I’ve had a bit more time to myself recently, and have had a bit more drive to get stuff done, so I decided to try and progress project pineapple a bit more. I’ve actually made a load of progress on it to a point at which I think in the next week or so I’d be ready to launch an early version.

I can very much be chaotic in my approach to things sometimes and I found (not so shockingly) that breaking the working into small actionable chunks makes it much easier to make progress 📈. One thing I also realised with my side projects is that I always have to over-engineer it, and I get to a point whereby I lose interest.

Hardware clocks and dual boot

Tue, 30 May 2023 10:17:56 +0100

So completely random (as always I guess) but I started noticing a problem with my windows PC when booting it up in the evening. I’d be working away or more likely playing games when I’d notice that the time on my PC was an hour behind the time on my phone?

So after a bit of research and learning about hardware clocks (RTC, real time clock), it turns out that the issue was due to my dual boot linux setup. Windows reads the hardware clock on startup and then uses the system clock from then on. Windows interprets the time set in the hardware clock based on local time, and so here in the UK it is UTC/GMT +1 hour (during summer). On the otherhand, when Linux boots up, it assumes that the time stored in the hardware clock is UTC and so it’s actually “an hour behind”.

Project Pineapple updates

Tue, 16 May 2023 09:41:18 +0100

So Mexico happened… I was severley unprepared for what to expect in terms of the culture and how things work. TLDR: Double petrol(gas) charges, toll roads without card payments and lost luggage 🧳

Anyway I’m home and the house is a bit of a bombshell. I’ll be starting to work on project pineapple again this week, trying to get a very basic MVP in place. I’ve been reading “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries and he emphasises a lot that you should attempt lots of quick experiments to test your assumptions.

Preparing for Mexico

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 14:25:16 +0100

This week has been quite blurry in terms of getting stuff done. It’s been interesting to see how losing access to Sunsama has affected my productivity. It actually makes quite a difference, but I can’t fathom paying $20 a month! 😅

Anyway, bank holiday is approaching and I’m packing my bags to go to Mexico for 2 weeks, in search of some long awaited rest and relaxation. It’s been a while since my partner and I have been on a vacation without family.

A spontaneous symposium

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 20:37:06 +0100

Since joining my current workplace, I’ve managed to see my esteemed colleagues twice in person. I’ve been there almost 9 months now!

It seems kind of weird and I think fully remote working has been somewhat isolating. I love the flexibility it provides, but I’d also like to see my work colleagues more in the flesh.

Those pixel faces aren’t quite the same…

Anyway, I managed to see them on a spontaneous chance, and it was great. We planned a lot of stuff and grabbed a beer after work 🍻.

Rethinking my work routine

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 09:11:11 +0100

So life has been crazily busy, from seeing family to small holidays it’s been an actioned packed couple of weeks. I’ve 100% decided that daily rambles is not possible for me at the moment, my dicipline is just not there yet!

Also I’m 99.99% sure I have ADHD. I’m not diagnosed, but all signs point in that direction. I’ve been trying to improve my workflow to keep me on track and to stop my mind wandering. I’ve found that super small approachable tasks are really great for helping me get work done.

A proper desk to work at

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:17:53 +0000

So my supposed daily ramble has been more of a ramble when you can…

Took some time off to go skiing. I came back in one piece which is surprising 🎉 Finally got my desk partially installed. It’s a solid countertop from wall to wall, super heavy and needed 6 people to lift! At somepoint I’ll stain it and setup my monitors.

Catching back up today on previous dagster work. It’s apparently crunch time.
📚 Also had chance to read some more of “Designing data intensive applications”
- Great book for understanding data engineering concepts. Helped me understand what my esteemed colleagues are talking about!

Data pipelines with dagster

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 10:46:34 +0000

Who knew daily updates requires effort and discipline!

Anyway today was a good day, managed to get something working regarding publishing events to SNS.

Dagster cloud environment variables are kind of whack! You can only really drive them manually through the cloud UI.
- (I later found you can use graphql, still not the best though.)
Lots of stuff to crack on with, lots of documentation to write up.

Sidebar, it’s really hard to not work from a proper desk 🖥️

Digging around dagster

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 11:46:56 +0000

Playing around with the dagster local development and trying to build a nice DAG.

Dagster has a really nice interface, although some of the naming conventions are kind of cryptic
It has a I/O manager for snowflake (Nice!)
Setting up and getting started with dagster is super simple.

I might dig out the raspberry pi this evening and try get dagster running on it for one of my old projects.