How is it March Already?
Ugh, I can’t get into the “zone” at all today. I guess it is ok, I will be on again all week. I am starting to feel the pressure of College assignments weighing down on me again. Pretty sure I’ve done due in two weeks, plus the labs from last week. I’ve one lab done, but I want to get stuck into the kubernetes one. So what else has been going one, I was up in Belfast for the first time this year for our Town Hall and that was too short a visit, it was awesome to get recognition for the AWS certification we did last year though. Everyone who achieved a cert was gifted an Amazon Echo Plus! That’s my second Echo to join with my Google Home Mini, so ambient computing is spreading across the Tolan household. I enjoy that my kids are totally comfortable with asking Google for things like turning on the TV and Netflix. I also get to see the shortfall of voice communications, you can’t do auto-complete with Voice you can’t start with “Gon-“ and get both Gon the Netflix cartoon for kids and Gone the drama for adults. No Google assistant makes a guess based on algorithmic probability (or however), and so Gon the dinosaur cartoon is impossible for my kids or me to call up via voice. Interesting observation, if nothing else.
I mean how could you even do auto-complete with voice, either your voice pattern is a match, or it isn’t. Seems counter productive to check back with the user on all the possibilities at this stage in voice recognition. Anyway – Belfast, I think I’ll make another trip up this week as it is on campus week for my MSc and so I don’t have classes Tuesday and Thursday for once. This will give me a chance to spend some weeknights on the assignments. We have a couple of really interesting ones and I am really looking forward to getting stuck into them. I fully intend to convert them into walk throughs like the one I’m partially through creating for Azure DevOps pipelines.
The big project is to evolve last year’s pipeline into a more advanced deployment approach with at least containers and probably kubernetes. I would like to develop my own app idea for tracking kids’ height, but I may default to the sample code if it is simpler for this assignment at least. As I say, I’ve not yet started working on them I’ve just started thinking about it. The other assignment is to create our own Chaos Monkey to verify our highly available designs in AWS. This is both simple and complex. To do barebones is simple and straightforward, but to do something cool will be both more challenging and more rewarding. Screw it I’m going for an A!
Hmm, and I didn’t even get a chance to write about my opensource work on the WMware VMC Module project. Hmm I do need to spend more time writing it seems, so much going on, so little time to do it and then to write about it….
Thanks for reading, Conor.
Thinking-Out-Loud