Uses

My workspace is a constant work in progress. I believe designing a workspace is an exercise in setting the tone and values of your work. We all design our workspaces, either intentionally or otherwise. Of late though, I have been making calculated moves to eliminate things that don’t work well and replace with stuff that sets an ambience that inspires creativity. My elimination process has evolved to identifying a weakness, deep diving into potential fixes, then buying something with a money-back guarantee, and friendly return policy (pro-tip). My list is not a recommendation list, but a collection of things that work very well for me, YMMV. Here we go:

I changed jobs, again!

Last year was a busy and also difficult year for most people. I hadn’t realized how hard it hit me until someone pointed out that I had written just one blog post the whole year! Of couse with Covid and major shifts in how people could socialize and work together, everything was so unpredictable. The one thing that I was still very happy about though, was the work I was doing over at JaSure. Since the beginning, we had been a remote company so we didn’t suffer in terms of culture when work moved to Zoom and people’s homes. Actually, I have worked remotely for close to 5/6 years now so it’s fair to say remote is ALL I know at this point.

How I passed AWS Developer Associate certification

I have always been interested in Devops, tinkering with servers, writing some bash scripts and always grabbed the chance to get my hands dirty in server side stuff. Despite my interest, I hadn’t dug deeper into cloud computing to get a full picture of how everything comes together and that irked me. In the course of building a side project and giving serverless architecture a real go I discovered I wasn’t knowledgeable to a level of comfort so I decided to get a better understanding of AWS. After finishing the course, I am so glad I took it and will share my learnings in future blog posts as I document the making of my new sideproject, nroute (more on that later). For now let’s discuss how I planned and passed it.

Seriousness

I am a huge Arsenal supporter. I started loving the club because they wore a shade of red I liked when I was young. As the years rolled by with Arsene Wenger as coach, I got to like his approach and method of putting the club’s values first, before victories. Arsenal was one of the clubs that could lose beautifully which would leave a conflict of emotions in supporters after a game, yes points would have been lost but you would also recall special, magical moments created on the field which would make you overlook the final result. Since Wenger left though, the club has been in a bit of a tailspin. Unai Emery who took over about 2 years ago failed to win the fans over because of an unattractive style of play and few victories which eventually culminated in his sacking. In his place, Mikel Arterta, a former captain was put at the the helm. While watching his first video as Arsenal coach the idea of this blog post came about. It was refreshing to hear how clear he was about what it takes for Arsenal to get back to greatness. One theme that I took away, is how serious he approaches his work and the level he requires of everyone who will contribute.

On belief:

…I want to start working with them (the players), I want to start looking in their eyes…

On culture:

…I know what a winning culture is and should look like, which is for me, the most important thing.

Leaving awesome OneSheep

This is a post that I didn’t foresee myself writing for the last 3 or 4 years. It is amazing how long but short that time has been. Every day was always so fresh and full of promise, all because of the wonderful folks I was working with. I remember it like yesterday when I got the offer to become a full time contractor at OneSheep. Having been a Drupal contractor 2 years prior, I jumped at the chance to work on some awesome (and very diverse projects) and what a whirlwind it’s been with so many great memories made!