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:

• Traveled to three states
• Moved sites to Google Cloud Engine/Kubernetes Engine
• Printed a new sticker

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

A post shared by Hamilton Greene (@sir.hamy) on Nov 7, 2018 at 9:01am PST

• Flew to SF for QCon SF 2018, wrote a quick recap about some of my findings

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Ima

A post shared by Hamilton Greene (@sir.hamy) on Nov 16, 2018 at 9:50am PST

• 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

A post shared by Hamilton Greene (@sir.hamy) on Nov 23, 2018 at 10:50am PST

• 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

A post shared by HAMY (@hamy.art) on Dec 8, 2018 at 12:49pm PST

• 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:

• Guesstimating how much revenue QCon SF 2018 brought in
• Conjecture on how Thieve.co makes money
• Thoughts on increasing my spending budget vs saving for long-term goals in an effort to make enough room in my budget to live with a bougie buddy

HAMY.OUT