Software

It is that time of the month where I have an internal crisis of competence regarding my career and ability. Technology is advancing, languages are maturing, frameworks are evolving, and I have been sitting back and stagnating. I never really make the best use of my time as you can probably tell from this blog. I find it very difficult to read a book the whole way through without getting distracted by a different book. I am not saying I need to spend 18 hours straight absorbing an entire book in one go, but I do need to set aside some time to read. As I work from home I can just fold this into my working day1. ...

It will be of absolutely no surprise to anyone that there is a resistance to the “RETURN TO OFFICE” mantra being released from the mouths many CEOs across the world like so much raw sewage into our waterways. The pandemic changed the relationship people have with their jobs. The power CEOs had over their employees melted away like their promises of pay increases1. If people did not realise how much time they were wasting on commuting2 to and from an office, they surely did now. I was working as a software developer at a medium sized firm from 2017 to 2022 and, like most jobs back then, it was an office job. All my jobs had been office jobs. This had never made sense to me. Software development is one of the prime examples of a role that can be done from home, and in my opinion, suffers for being in the offce full-time. ...

I’ve been spending some time recently thinking about what I want to focus on in my career as an very average software developer. I do not want to just be a code monkey that can be replaced by AI in about 3 months’ time. Nor do I want to be an architect that just talks about code and has no real involvement in the process. My current skillset, such as it is, consists of C#, .NET, Python, SQL, and JavaScript. ...

At work, as part of the project I’m on, I’ve been working with a third-party open-source application for the last few months. It is a Python application that requires customising in order to fit the way it needs to work. Most of the functionality stays the same, except in cases where that functionality needs to be extended or modified to fit with the needs of the application I am working on. ...

This website … lives! That’s right, I’ve managed to get this website to deploy to Azure as a static web app via a GitHub Action CI/CD workflow. It’s currently using the catchy URL https://black-flower-040f62903.4.azurestaticapps.net/, but this will be changing when I eventually transfer over my retrogradeonline.com domain. Just have to enter the CNAME hostname record and give it to my DNS provider. I am not the greatest when it comes to websites. It always seemed to lie outside the realms of the software development that I was involved in. IT Support always knew how to deal with this stuff. That’s the Ops part of DevOps though, and I have never liked DevOps. ...