Month: October 2017

Putting Together Medium Lists of Mediums

Recently I tweeted this, mostly in jest of the plethora and confusion of mediums in which to publish content, but also as a kind of reminder to get things straight for myself. Then, by order of that get something written so I could tell others where I put what, and what is what that I publish. Here’s the details.

Medium — i.e. this blog, is a place where I’m going to journal about whatever and I do mean whatever. I might write about cycling, tech, coding, city planning, music, or all sorts of things. No topic is going to be off limits but the one overriding theme here is this will be off the cuff, spontaneous, quickly written and probably completely unedited content that I post. More simply, this is going to be where I write out my stream of consciousness. I have no idea, especially since this is a new effort on my behalf, how frequent it may be. I am guessing I may post 1–4 times per week.

Composite Code — This is my technical blog, with a touch of metal monday, and other things related to my technical interests and my technical work. This is mostly going to include things like conferences, meetups, and where I’ll be speaking, technical docs, write ups on how-tos with languages, tech stack deployments, site reliability engineering, and related material. I post a blog entry here about every ~10–15 days I believe. However I am working on making a much more regular post to this blog to the frequency of about 1–3 times per week.

Twitter— This is my twitter feed, it is indeed merely a twitter feed. It includes a host of tech related things, but also I engage, use it as a primary communication medium with the tech community, and sometimes ramble on about a few other random thoughts or post some solid, brutally awesome, heavy as heavy is, heavy metal. Twitter tends to be my highest volume medium in which I post things to, at about 25–30 tweets per day.

Thrashing Code News — This is my newsletter. I use this to get subscribers first details on upcoming conferences I may be involved in organizing, or conferences that I find that are must attend events. I also post some minor summaries of blog entries for the month (sometimes) and also post about upcoming meetups I’ll be speaking at or other travels out and about where we may be able to meetup, hack some code, enjoy a coffee, have a round of beer, eat, or otherwise get together and nerd on tech, code, and related things. I generally publish a new newsletter every 40–60 days. It’s very low volume!

LinkedIn — I don’t really do much here besides receive emails from tons of random recruiters who 94.6% of the time never actually read my profile, but send me stuff for jobs like “C# Code Janitor” and “Trash Fire Putter Outterer”. My real use for LinkedIn tends to boil down to two specific things: one is a place to put work and resume descriptions and such, and two I use it as an way to manage some auth and interactions. I check this about once every 4–20 days.

Just Another Sunday

I sit here at the moment watching two Kubernetes Clusters build. One is building on Azure and one on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). I’ve got a presentation coming up this Tuesday and Thursday, both I’ll be digging into Kubernetes, Terraform, and a number of other technologies. Those are the two hot technologies for the talks though. Albeit, the continuous integration, languages, and tooling that Terraform builds via configuration and Kubernetes runs in containers is what is actually the meat of this whole sandwich. Which is where I ponder what all of this goo is that wires together things in this virtual programmatic realm in which I’ll build something on top of.

It seems messy from inception. But then of course, all programming and related ecosystem elements in which programming takes place is a messy bag of guts.

Here I sit then, waiting the rather unknown pseudo random amount of time for the Kubernetes Clusters to finish building. A few moments pass and sure enough, as always, very inconsistent build times. The Azure Kubernetes Cluster took 7 minutes to build and the GCP Kubernetes Cluster took just 4 minutes. Last night the Azure cluster was taking 20 minutes or more while the GCP cluster was consuming about 3–4 minutes to build. I’m not sure, as I’ve not dug into the matter deep enough, but something seems awry within the way Azure needs to build out its instances, networking, and related cluster mechanisms. I’m not surprised though, Azure has always behaved and felt slow and cumbersome during the build out of infrastructure. GCP on the other hand clearly comes from Google’s thoroughbred engineering focus on things. It generally builds in a much smaller range of time, consuming much less time overall.

As I build all of this, to work out what will and won’t be in the demo, I find myself next fiddling with presentation material. I really don’t even like to have presentation material, I’d much rather have an interesting enough talk and respective code, samples, and demo to just show the whole thing. Presentation slide decks always fell like, and almost always are, just a crutch for the inability to form ideas, show concepts, or otherwise actually engage the audience around what is being presented. It’s a frustrating dichotomy to say the least. Eventually, with these latest efforts, I actually intend to get down to two slides: one for my information when ending the talk, the requisite contact information and such, then two would be the intro slide with a fancy title for whatever the meat of the talk will be about.

All of this work however is going to be interrupted by the dramatically more important bike ride I’ll take later to clear my thoughts and get the blood flowing through my veins. As things go, I actually dislike sitting still for more than a few hours. I like to chunk my time into brackets, get the work done, and then go for a ride, walk, or something to get my mind cleared back up. I hear it’s healthier for us humans too, but I’ve not set the research to memory to make that argument.

Until later… fini.