2020 Update

January 10, 2020 ยท 3 minutes read

2020 fireworks Jude Beck/unsplash

Happy New Year!

In 2020 I realized I wanted to write more blog content. I only wrote 3 posts in all of 2019. When I started this blog, I thought the content would be educational, semi-tutorials for software development and design. However, writing long blogs was more draining than I expected. My free time comes in fleeting, unexpected bursts. Experiential blogs require research, drafting, compiling snippets and images, and review. This is not a bad thing, but take the GitHub Actions article for instance. Nearly everything in that blog has been deprecated (thanks, GitHub) in less than a year. The slow-burn of writing content with instructional value and observations is still something I will pursue on seedshare, yet in 2020 I plan to release frequent, short-form blogs based on creative thoughts and topics of discussion without any driving conclusion.

articles in production

I have a few projects currently planned, and I will continue to develop them. Many have already started, but these are the “slow-burn” experiential blog posts. It will likely take time to gather the info, resources, fact-checking, and testing to produce them fully. Giving myself space to write shorter content will reinforce the cadence of contributions. If you checked the GitHub repository for this site, you may already be familiar with my in-progress work. Regardless, here is a preview of what is coming in 2020 on seedshare.

how to survive microservices

Honestly, this piece was only delayed because I'm still searching for answers. Expect a deep look at what it has been like to craft many services from 1 original monolith in my team. We also had to contend with a complicated, hybrid cloud deployment, a distributed & global team, and immense holiday performance pressure. Spoiler, we survived. But why?

the one about IoT

I had a side-project involving Raspberry Pi 3's, k3s (a lightweight kubernetes distro), and Eclipse Che or Theia. Basically an embedded micro-cloud running a distributed IDE. This would make for a super useful programming environment that costs less than an actual cloud-based IDE subscription. This project is on ice right now because I needed to unplug RPi3's and free up outlets for Christmas lights. Rebooting soon.

3D bin packing

I have done work on bin-packing in previous work projects. I wrote approximation algorithms to tackle the NP-hard problem for cost optimization in back-of-store operations in Sears to reduce the cost of shipping e-commerce orders. I no longer work for Sears, yet I want to revisit this problem in the future. My goal is to develop an open-source solver, unrelated to any previous work. This project will also have a kick-ass UI with 3D visualizations.

3dbp visualization

looking forward

I will continue progress on these and more projects, and compile blog posts to cover each experience. In addition, expect short posts which I plan to release.

  • book recommendations
  • startup ideas
  • finding technical interview questions
  • GitHub Actions pt. 2
  • my Google analytics
  • podcasting notes

I am grateful for anyone reading this in 2020. We'll make it a year for the ages.