Life Happens

Almost two full years have passed since the point when I had “the energy” to write content. And, as most podcasts fail after just a few episodes, I’ve been unable to keep up with the writing. It was a genuine surprise to see how much effort goes into even the simplest of articles.

This, in turn, generated a significant inspirational backlog for potential content shortly.

Looking back on those two years, I’m happy with the outcome, and I don’t feel much regret for not writing. As the internet doesn’t forget, this might serve mostly as a reminder to myself when I look back on this point a few years down the road. Just writing my own timeline took some time, as each week was packed with more work than I wanted it to be! Work-life balance?!

What might I write about next year?

Emphasis on might!

  • Nix and management of my Mac

  • Bazel

    • Deep dive into Bazel and potential use cases
    • Migrating from v5/6 to v7 (or even preview of v8)
    • Migrating from rules_k8s to rules_oci
    • Migrating from old WORKSPACES to the new approach with Modules

  • Observability

    • What worked for me and what was essentially a waste of time
    • How to approach Observability in a new project

  • Terraform

  • GCP & K8S

    • Match made in heaven or a disaster waiting to happen?

  • Zig & Go

  • BJJ

  • FlyFishing

What I’ve been up to?

2023

Projects

TLDR; Upped my skills in Observability, Terraform, GCP, Go, and Kubernetes. 🐳

Start of the year was marked by great fortune, as I got an opportunity to collaborate with a company that specializes in Terraform and extensively utilizing GCP (Google Cloud Platform). From a technical standpoint, that offered me a lot of room to do true deep dives into a few projects I did for them:

  • Observability on GCP
    • The base project was written in Go, thus I could leverage OTEL
    • Learned a lot about the Prometheus and Grafana stack
    • Learned how powerful can logging and tracing actually be on GCP
      • Became a fanboy of Tracing 🫢
    • Got my hands dirty with Loki and Tempo
  • Terraform
    • Used the chance to learn an obscure side of Terraform
    • Adapted to a few different ways of writing and processing it [read stacks vs. workspaces vs. tg]
  • Go
    • A few major migrations from existing services
      • This bit was per requirement, but later, I’ve realized that I should have pushed back on it, as it created more problems than solutions
    • Introduced a custom testing suite
  • Kubernetes
    • The first time I did a deep dive into GKE

Looking back on it, I am grateful for both the learning opportunity and the personal growth offered, as I had to adapt significantly to the new environment.

And the downtime during the year I spent to incubate two startups, mostly technically and a bit on the front of teamformation. This, by my own surprised, brought a lot of business troubles of which I was not aware of. And even though it was not a pleasant thing, still I’m grateful that I’ve gone through it, as I now can say with certainty that it’s always important to understand business domain before diving into architecture and tech.

Finally, created a Home Lab (k3s | kds) and had a lot of fun with it!

Personal

  • Lots of time with kiddos 🥰
  • Shifted a bit from FlyFishing back into fitness
  • Deep dives into investing and personal finance

2024

Projects

TLDR; Bazel, Graph Databases, and Crypto. 🐳

I had a brief break from the rat race - I intended it to span a few months, but I was surprised by a new opportunity… It’s hard saying no to a social network, so that brought a few new challenges:

  • Bazel
    • Explored all dark avenues of it
    • Had fun adapting to a really niche use-cases
    • Multi-platform builds, with multi-architecture support [e.g., all major devices and all systems had to be supported]
  • Graph Databases
    • Migrated abstraction layer of a social graph from “deprecated” system to something fresh and dandy
    • Used Gremlin with AWS Neptune for the first time
      • Learned a lot about the TinkerPop stack
      • Came to realization that I would never use this in my own product (hint Neo4j ftw)😂
  • Observability
    • Again, a ton of work on this front
    • Expanded the stack to include Pyroscope and Alloy

And as a true bonus for this year, joined a crypto project; DevSecOps, having tons of fun!

Personal

  • Lots of time with kiddos 🥰
  • FlyFishing is back on the menu
  • BJJ is back on the menu as well! Knee recovery is going perfectly