JPoser/Blog

I started a new role around a year a go at a FinTech startup which has afforded me a level of freedom to implement DevOps practices in a way that wasn’t possible in my last job. One of the first things I wanted to implement was a way of managing our infrastructure as code. I’d like to quickly run through how I achieved this with Terraform, Git and Jenkins. Terraform I’ve looked at before, it’s a product from hashicorp that provides a common language for configuration of infrastructure resources. This makes it perfect for managing cloud deployments.It also makes managing that code base extremely sensitive as incorrect or conflicting changes can cause huge disruption an even irretrievable data loss to production systems.

I found a car park behind my work which had an extremely convenient skateboard wheel sized crack in it. This allows you to stand on the board and not worry about it shooting out from under you. I’ve just been going out every day, standing there for an hour trying to drill it into my legs. And like everything the more you do something the better you get at it. Every couple of days something would click, I’d figure out that if I lifted my back foot off the board really fast (aka “jumping”) the board would come up higher this sounds incredibly obvious but just having the confidence to really jump off your tail is a big step.

I’d been riding a skateboard into working every day for a month or so (I realise I'm becoming more like Nathan Barley by the week) when I decided that I wanted to learn some tricks. The most essential skate trick is the Ollie, a jump on a skateboard where the board rises as you jump. To somebody whose only ever played Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater it seems easy, it is not.

Superuser on the Geek News Radio discord (which should already be in your podcatcher) got Megaslippers to post one of these lists and it sounded like fun. I tried to stick to games I played in the year they were released but there are a few exceptions like the years where I didn't know what a Nintendo was.

I have a very basic taste in film that hasn’t really evolved since I was 14. Even so there were loads of films that I loved this year. These were my 5 favourites.

This was the year I finally caved and subscribed to Spotify and started listening to music again. These are my 5 favourite albums of the year.

I can’t think of a better year for video game releases this decade and these are my favourite 5 of the year. I’m not being super strict on release dates. I tend to buy games a few months after release to take advantage of sales, so there are a couple of games here that are from the last half of 2016 and one which is a re-release. They are however all games I played this year.

It's the end of the year and I thought I would do the traditional blog series running through the culture I've enjoyed and the technology I've used. So over the next few weeks I'll be writing up my thoughts on the this years games, films and music.