Workplace Telepathy

I mean this in the least toxic way I can: I want my teammates to be mind readers. This is not an expectation. In order to work well together, you shouldn’t have to anticipate something I want without communication, but I have found that there’s been a measure of making my thoughts available that some coworkers leveraged to get their work done. It’s fantastic, and while not ESP, it’s almost magical to have your thoughts laid out in a way for a coworker to just run with.

Home Lab Journal Part 1 - Getting Started Again

I have a relatively simple home lab. It’s mainly just a NAS, media server running PLEX, and a remote VPS that runs a service that I want to keep up more reliably. I’ve been watching more Home Lab videos on YouTube lately, and decided to start sprucing up my home lab so that I do some more tinkering at home. I wanted to get to the point where I could run a Kubernetes cluster at home. But first I had few issues to solve.

Getting a 1000% Cost Improvement in DynamoDB

A couple of years ago, my team was given a target to cut back our cloud costs. When the director I work under told me about the goal, I gave him the immediate feedback that we did not have everything we needed to reach that goal. We were being asked to engineer for cost, but not provided with the cost data to see whether, or not we were actually improving that metric.

Dusting off the Tool Box

I’ve often had the idea of having a git repository to just store odds and ends; tools that I’ve made; scripts etc. While setting up my latest Linux install, I rediscovered my tool_box git repository. I’ve mainly started using it as a way to share my new neovim configuration between work and home. That’s said, I found an interesting tool that I left in there back in 2017.

What's Good for the JR is Good for the SR

I’ve often found that it’s a good idea to share diagrams and documentation widely. I try my best to share whenever I create documentation. That said the team gets busy, and sometimes it feels like I’m adding noise to the team chat if I share out absolutely everything. This has led to me being more selective over time. I recently had a reminder that I should be sharing things more broadly.

Using PowerShell to Find Outdated Ubuntu Containers

With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’s sunset on the horizon, my manager forwarded an email about the need to update all of our Docker images to version 22.04. He sent it out as an FYI, but I took a moment to context switch towards answering this question because I thought that I could figure this out quickly using a one-liner in PowerShell.

Stepping Back and Letting a JR Train a SR

At the end of 2024, my team hired a new SR developer. Soon after hiring the new SR, we started a new initiative to enhance our automated test coverage. My team in particular while having a good amount of coverage with unit tests, didn’t have key UI modules instrumented to use MockServer. We did have a pattern that the JR developer on my team developed with collaboration from the our Software Engineers in Test (SEIT). With all of this in mind, it seemed clear that we had two opportunities: 1) we can have the new SR on board into more of our UI components by instrumenting those modules for MockServer, and 2) we can have the JR engineer train the SR on a previous implementation to strengthen the skills of our JR engineer.

Terraform Depends On Success

My team has been working on modernizing our data engineering and business intelligence processes. We have started to build Terraform modules for tracking the tables, stored procedures, scheduled queries etc that we deploy to BigQuery. Through iterating on these modules, our team forgot to capture the dependency information for the new entities that we were creating. Since we started with entities that already existed and mostly grafted on new entities we didn’t really track the dependencies. That meant that when we started deploying new modules with green field entities, we ended up having to double run our Terraform deployment to build out all of the entities that were missed in the first failing run.

Shop Time Part 6 - Accidental Wine

There are two guava trees on the property that my wife and I currently rent. Our first year living there we couldn’t handle how many guavas these two trees rained down on us. We were so unable to handle the mess that it made that I think the land lord noticed and asked us if we don’t like guavas. I liked them just fine, I just didn’t know how to handle over 50 pounds of guavas.

TypeScript Code Smell Any instead of a type parameter

I was recently forking a TypeScript library at work. We had an existing library that does a lot of what we want that we want to refactor to use a new backend, but we want to leave the current implementation alone. I won’t completely unpack this, but we decided to create a fork and refactor.