Kind bookmarks

This was a great talk at Women in Tech when Carol Gilabert did it, and there was a lot of really great things that I took away from it for my own application process 👀

This is a good tip for any language!

I've recently been doing similar with some of my utilities, albeit with an informal comparison between Ruby and Go versions, but would agree that for large, production critical scrips, this is a great way to do it

I've been bitten by pinning to latest versions before and definitely agree that where possible we should make sure that things are pinned exactly.

Then we can use tools like Whitesource Renovate / Dependabot to manage updates automatically.

My colleague Bethan wrote about the work we're currently doing on Federated API Discovery across government. Very much recommend a read about why we're doing it, and we'll be doing more posts in the future about progress, but until then, you can check out the repo

Thanks to Carol Gilabert for sharing this podcast last week.

Since leaving Capital One, I've realised that a lot of my self esteem and self worth has been poured into my work, and I was (mostly) getting a lot of satisfaction out of work, and enjoyed the fact that I was always busy, with sprint work, out-of-sprint work, and a tonne of internal side projects to work on, as well as general maintenance of libraries, as well as a wealth of proactive production support.

With my new role at the Data Standards Authority, I've been working to strike a better life-work balance, and the lack of "here's a billion things to work on at the same time" that I thought I was thriving on has made me realise that maybe I've been so used to being in this mode that I just assumed that I did enjoy it.

This podcast (and its transcript) is a good look at The Great Resignation, the way that workers across industries have been reconsidering their relationship to work, and with a wealth of options for jobs out here, as well as thinking about not what they want, but deserve.

I'm still working on my own relationship with work and how I find fulfillment in my life, and would recommend you have a listen/read to see if there's anything in there for you, too.

I'd agree that learning skills is important, especially as general command line proficiency can be helpful regardless of how you host but remember that everything is a tradeoff - what does your company differentiate on, and do you have time to learn how to scale infra or can you outsource to get to market quicker?