November 2018 Release Notes

Date: 2018-12-07 | hamy | hamy-art | the-hamniverse | reflections |

November was a busy month full of travel, connections, and projects. Busy months are highly fulfilling wrt accomplishments, but often come with a heavy toll.

Traveling is tiring. Connecting is tiring. Producing is tiring.

Months like these make you appreciate the down times in life, when you can kick back with a General Tso's combo from China King and watch multiple hours of an 7.7+ IMDB-rated title.

Didn't I just do that five days ago? Yes, but sometimes you wish you'd done it two days ago as well.

Of note in November:

Adventures

I traveled a lot this month and have even more travel scheduled for December. I like traveling, that's no secret, but I tend to either travel not at all or halfway around the world which leads to a roller coaster of excitement/exhaustion. I've previously noticed similar patterns in other areas of life and have subsequently committed to normalizing those peaks and valleys with limited success, so I wonder if this is just an oddity of the way I run my life or just the way it is.

Regardless, I'm currently in the midst of a travel climb and already feel some of the effects of its partner exhaustion but have a long way to go before reaching the summit so expecting lots of caffeine in my near future.

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#hamfrancisco

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Ima

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  • Flew to Atlanta for an APT recruiting dinner
  • Had several visitors, went to a few shows (Seven Lions, Rezz)
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One of us graduated

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  • Fam came up for Thanksgiving week and then trained to Boston to celebrate the holiday

Upcoming:

  • Two weeks in Europe! Still recovering from the last month of adventure, but know this is gonna be a blast.

Projects

This month, I've been focused on getting The Hamniverse to a point where I could focus on feature building and not on stability/maintenance. This meant a lot of work into how I hosted, deployed, and various tweaks to blog settings to get it ~how I wanted.

The process was not easy. There were a lot of areas that I had little previous knowledge of (like how do people in the real world (outside of enterprise environments) get their shit deployed?) which necessitated a good amount of investigation just to get a "lay of the land" perspective.

After doing that work and actually implementing my own process, I do feel a lot more knowledgeable/competent in the area and am excited to pass on some of these learnings/leverage them in my future projects.

Endeavor: success.

The Hamniverse

  • Various improvements to The Hamniverse (*.hamy.xyz domains)
    • RSS feed support for hamy.xyz
    • RSS feed support for hamy.xyz
    • Added ability to comment via Hugo's built-in Disqus integration
    • Separated Google Analytics tracking codes for more granular log data
    • Moved sites from Digital Ocean to Google Cloud Engine
    • Moved off of Docker Compose to Kubernetes, leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine
    • Implemented Continuous Delivery of repositories to GKE via GitLab CI

Upcoming

  • With new CI/CD implementation, expect more regular posts. Would recommend following via RSS feed (see above section) if you want to stay up-to-date
  • Will likely be writing about a lot of the process of implementation because it was hard

HAMY.ART

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New *ku, same ham

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  • New stickers came in though the designs themselves aren't new

Upcoming

  • Been thinking about moving my art space into The Hamniverse but still have some questions about the storage and distribution of large image files in large quantities
  • Probably going to be seeing a lot of pictures of these new stickers as I plaster Europe with them

Self

A busy month usually means less time alloted to Self. That seems pretty true for November. Halfway through, I decided I was going to be better about eating and exercising, then Thanksgiving happened which killed both of those, then I got exercising back on track, then I got sick, and now I'm trying to get back on the horse. Life be like that sometimes.

In other news, I've got a good lead on a solid roommate and housing choices for next year (with room for a desk being mandatory) so pretty excited about that.

What you might have missed

Updates from The Hamniverse that didn't land in another section:

HAMY.OUT

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