2023 Retrospective

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 23:59:59 +0000

This year has been a difficult one, work has been rough, with redundancies looming over everything right from the start of the year, good friends losing their jobs, and many good people choosing to move on. I managed to completely avoid the redundancy process, though it did come with a lot of change. The IT Ops team I was in was disbanded and I was moved into a DevOps role in a dev team, which has been good but at times I’ve felt like not a lot has really changed other than my job title. I’ve learned a lot though and with the long term prospects of work looking like they were going to be very Salesforce focused, with the next 2-3 years moving towards retiring almost all our linux systems. I decided to start applying for jobs in the summer.

Through applying for jobs I realised some important things, I actually am missing quite a lot of skills that employers are looking for out in the market place. Specifically around public cloud skills, docker, Kubernetes, these are the skills people are looking for. I do have some experience with these technologies but not enough really to land a job, or so I thought. One key bit of feedback I had was that the way CAP does things is too ‘old school’. The impression I get is not a lot of organisations out there are doing manual deployments to single servers. This isn’t really new news to me, I wanted to move CAP to a more modernised infrastructure for years but that takes time, and investment. Combine this with the organisations desire to move to platform based tech and retire our open source applications… well, the competing goals don’t really line up.

Then I got a job offer from DWP Digital for a DevOps engineer role. Following previous interviews I’d really not expected this to happen, but went through the interview for the experience. Following a very long process of getting various checks done I’ve now actually expecting to get an actual offer from them in the coming weeks. I’m excited for what opportunities might come from this role, but also it’s hard to think of leaving CAP. Despite all the challenges over the last year it will still be hard to walk away from something that’s been part of my life for the last 14 years. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved in my time there (which likely warrants it’s own post), and while I’m leaving a lot of good people behind, and a lot of ideas unfinished, I still believe in the charity and all they stand for.

With the long lead time on DWP I started experimenting more with AWS and Terraform. I’ve enjoyed getting stuck into learning some new tech. I might of bitten off more than I could chew, trying to get a ECS cluster built with terraform has been a challenge, but that’s how I learn best. There’s a million courses out there that will teach you this stuff but I like to get hands on when it comes to learning. I like to learn by doing, by figuring something out for myself. Anyone can follow a guide, but when those guides don’t quite work anymore I like to work out why and find my own way though. I’m hoping to share some of what I’ve learned here.

My daughter started school this year, so now we have 2 children in school. She has taken to it really well, is happy to go and seems to be learning all that she needs to learn. She is a very different character to my son, who is in year 3 now and has struggled. He likes school once he’s there but getting him in can be a battle, we need to help him find the positives in it. He’s always happy when he comes home, and when he talks about his day it’s actually really positive. With both kids out of the house 5 days a week, my wife has started her art work again which has been great to see. I’ve built a website for her which is very basic at the moment but thats what she wanted.

We had another action packed summer, I started it by turning 40. Something that’s not really bothered me to be honest, I don’t feel like I should be 40. I still just feel like I did at 30. I have a bit more responsibly now sure, 2 kids to look after as well as a wife. I still feel like I always did though, like I’m going though life and working it out as I go. We spent a number of weeks camping in Filey again, and some time down south. One thing we need to make sure we build in is more time at home, the kids really value this, and so do I. We also now own a sailing boat, which we haven’t really spent much time on. Hopefully we’ll find more time to get out on her this year.

Gaming has been very light touch this year, my most played game was Stardew valley. I brought Balders Gate 3 when it came out but haven’t found much time for it, though I did really enjoy it when I did play. I write this now on a computer that we actually own as a family, this was a bit investment for us, but it felt right to not use the CAP laptop for personal reasons and combined with the CAP laptop going away sometime soon, it felt like the right time to be moving on. Natalie was, surprisingly, relatively easy to convince.

What does 2024 hold for me though? Well the big thing this year will be the new job, leaving CAP and starting a the DWP. It’s going to be a huge change to adjust to but one I’m excited about for sure, meeting new people, learning new ways of doing things and progressing in my career. I want to get back into learning game dev, which I haven’t touched this year. I want to write more on this blog. Time will tell how well that actually ends up going. So 2023… you sucked in many ways but there were some good times, here’s to 2024 being way better.

2022 Retrospective

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 23:59:59 +0000

This last year has been a significant one. Perhaps the biggest thing for me, and for my family, is we haven’t had any major DIY projects. Sure there’s been a few bit done, but nothing involving time off work or rooms out of action. It’s the first year since we got married that I can say that.

My son started school, and he’s been loving it. That’s been a big adjustment for the family. No more freedom to choose when we go on holiday. He has settled into school life well. Our daughter has missed him but is also learning to find her own way when he’s not around. My wife has also found it hard not having him around, but her life is a little easier because she only has one child to look after for 6 hours of the day.

It’s been a unique year at work as well. We moved out of an old building into a new one. A massive project unlike any we’ve had before, or will probably have again. We are finally Cyber Essentials certified. After years of talking about it, we actually got it! Our dev team has just about doubled in size, with no increase on the ops side, which has meant a lot more work supporting them.

With the lack of DIY to focus on, I found myself with free time, which I’ve spent learning game development in Godot. Its early days still, but I am enjoying a new challenge. I have done programming before, but nothing quite like this. There is a lot of maths that I just don’t understand at all. I’m excited to get into making some pixel art next year.

After a year or so break, I’m back at the D&D table. This time it’s actually a real table as well. Playing a wizard call Arthur, who’s the old man of the party. He isn’t worldly wise as he’s spent his entire life studying. After finding an unusual book, he’s been drawn out into the real world to uncover its secrets. We are only a few sessions into the campaign, but I’m enjoying playing a more complex class that doesn’t just shoot or hit things.

I’m not a big reader at all, but I did read some books this year. Most notably, I finished reading the Narnia series to William. It was my first time reading them as well, which is perhaps surprising for someone who’s a fantasy fan. I enjoyed them thoroughly but felt the ending was a bit of a letdown. Game of thrones book one was the first book I read this year. It’s not for me. Too many stories going on at the same time, too dark. I reread the first two King Killer chronicle books, probably my fourth read of these - I still hold out hope for book three being released! The Rithmatist was the first Brandon Sanderson book that I didn’t actually enjoy. I restarted Harry Potter with books one and two; I want to continue the series again next year. I’m just over half way through book one of the wheel of time, I’ve found it a struggle to get into, at this point I’m not sure I’ll continue the series. I also started but didn’t finish the Invisible Library. It’s a cool concept but again maybe just not for me, but I might give it another chance.

With the shutdown of Stadia, I find myself not doing much gaming at all this year. Though I enjoyed revisiting Stardew Valley for a bit. I played some more Witcher 3 on GeForce Now and tried out Xbox cloud a bit. Stadia was a great service. It lacked the games, needed to really do well. I’ve been preferring to focus on learning how to do game development myself these last few months, rather than play other people’s games.

As I look ahead to 2023, our daughter will be going to school in September, which will free up a lot of time for my wife. She wants to be an artist and is already selling some of her work. As she gets more time to focus on this, we really hope she can make some additional income. Having spent this last year not doing DIY, I’m hopeful that we can make our workshop a bit more comfortable in the winter months by adding some insulation and heating. This will be really key for my wife as she starts doing her art work more regularly down there. For me, I’m happy where I am. I continue to find work interesting and challenging. Financially, things are getting tough everywhere for everyone, and in the workplace as well, which is going to bring further challenges. I am thankful for all that I have and all that I’ve achieved this last year.

Retrospective on mattous.co.uk

2023 Retrospective

2022 Retrospective