What I’m working on this week - july 8-12
This week has started off with a lot of tumultuous software stuff: I’ve been working on a long-term project to migrate us off of an older ORM version (SQLAlchemy 1.4 to 2.0), and the deployment didn’t go as planned the first two times. One of them threw some errors which were a bit arcane, so we rolled back, and the next threw those errors again despite a partial deployment. The way that we’re doing things is not a full switch-over of EC2 instances, so we had to do some fancy footwork in order to roll back.
The third time was the charm, done within a maintenance window. We had some hiccups due to end to end testing failing due to our maintenance window, which we got around, and finally the cached sessions on 1.4 were wiped and we were able to successfully use the 2.0 library. I’ve been working on pushing this forward for nearly three months. It’s a slog and I’m glad it’s over.
Outside of work, I’m mostly chillin’ in Oceanside, waiting for my family to arrive in Carlsbad. I’m doing a lot of reading, getting through Killing Commendatore, which is excellent so far (although I knew that Murakami would throw in some dream sex as he always does, classic). Choose Possibility has been an interesting read, although it feels a bit self-aggrandizing albeit self-aware; the author catalogues her successes in riding the tailwinds of the up-and-coming internet while being in the hotbed of Silicon Valley but she chalks a lot of it up to luck. Her company was acquired by Amazon, she climbed the ranks, and so on—she’s currently the president of StubHub, and I don’t want to devolve to ad hominem, but I find such ticket scalping companies generally deplorable. I wish that I had done a bit of research while standing in Elliott Bay Book Company in Capitol Hill, but the synopsis seemed interesting enough.
The book isn’t without merit: I agree that generally people have a fear of the unknown, and risk-taking is a muscle which we need to exercise often. Risks are not always going to break you as you might expect— the author discusses the choice after the choice, and how we often can analyze our options after we make a move which feels monumental to identify that we probably have more options than anticipated. She talks about the myth of single choice, in which people think that one move is going to make-or-break: more often than not, risks will simply promote gradual shifts in a life.
Outside of reading, I’m continuing to study for my NASM certification, as I hope to take the test at the beginning of August when I land in Seattle.
I’m doing a lot of thinking about where I end up after my travels. The goal is to keep romping around until I hit a spot which gives me a conclusive “hell yes.” I’m hoping to take notes on these places, and the main point of my whole remote trip is to evaluate where I might want to settle down: I’m looking for a place which I feel would be conducive to my artistic and professional endeavors, relationships, social/cultural vibe, and so on.
Oceanside doesn’t quite fit the bill, although it is a nice place. I enjoy the consistently cool morning haze which burns off around noon. Many of the cafe-goers are families or older folks, typically with a California teenager lugging around a longboard. I’m still in sticker shock coming from San Francisco—I can get a healthy and filling lunch for less than $20!
I’m taking the day a bit early and I’ll be off to the beach. It’s nostalgic for me to hang out with them here, except instead of coming from the heat, I’m coming from chilly San Francisco.
I liked these two articles that I read on Medium recently. I roll my eyes at the cheesy template of most Medium writers, as they’re doing what they need to do to get clicks, but I can agree with the content.
