Skip to main content

A self-imposed career break to spend more time with family

It's 2025 and I am back to blogging on my personal site, so what has been happening?

For the past few years I have been posting some of my ponderings on another site - a blog that is internal to Atlassian, where I have been working as a senior software developer.

That brings me around to why I am going to resume posting here. I have decided to dedicate my time to helping out with a senior family member, stepping completely away from work commitments for a while.

Personal progress

On my first fresh non-work day I have found myself unblocked from making progress on something that I have been comtemplating for a couple of months - I have purchased a more modern car. A 2020 hybrid seems like a nice step up from a 2007 regular petrol car.

Family health progress

Without going into any detail, the family member who had been facing some challenging medical needs has made a remarkable come-back. We are taking things one day at a time.

Things to do

Don't expect much technical output from me for a while, as there is still a need for me to help out with gardening and household maintenance.

Not having any slack notifications for a month or three seems quite appealing.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Speeding up Software Builds for Continuous Integration

Downloading the Internet Can you remember the last time you started out on a clean development environment and ran the build of some software using Maven or Gradle for dependency management? It takes ages to download all of the necessary third party libraries from one or more remote repositories, leading to expression like, "Just waiting for Maven to download the Internet". Once your development environment has been used for building a few projects the range of dependencies that will need to be downloaded for other builds reduces down as the previously referenced onces will now be cached and found locally on your computer's hard drive. What happens on the Continuous Integration environment? Now consider what goes on when Jenkins or your other preferred Continuous Integration server comes to build your software. If it doesn't have a local copy of the libraries that have been referenced then it is going to pay the cost of that slow " download the Internet" p...

2022 - A year in review

Just a look back over the last 12 months. January I moved back to Christchurch to live, after having spent a few months further south since moving back from London. Work was mainly around balancing other peoples' understanding and expectations around our use of Kafka. February I decided that it would be worthwhile to have a year's subscription for streaming Sky Sports, as some rugby matches that I would want to watch would be on at time when venues wouldn't be open. Having moved to Christchurch to be close to an office, now found myself working from home as Covid restrictions came back into effect across New Zealand. March Got back into some actual coding at work - as opposed to mainly reviewing pull requests for configuration changes for Kafka topics.  This became urgent, as the command line interface tool that our provisioning system was dependent on had been marked for deprecation. April   Had my first direct experience with Covid-19.  I only went for a test because ...

Designing systems - The "ity"s That Limit or Enable Profitability

Introduction This started off as a little aide-mémoire to get my head into the right space for preparing for an interview. It's not an exhaustive list, and twists terminology that has been used to represent other things (see:  to Velocity), so don't treat it as a text book reference to work from. Most of the listed points can be associated back to so called "non-functional requirements" - NFRs. I don't like that particular terminology, so alternatively we might consider them as dimensions of the quality of the sytem. Usability "If you build it, they will come" should come with a provisor, "... but if it's awkward to use they'll soon go away, and might not come back." Security All of the aspects that combine to protect data from being seen or manipulated by anyone other than the intended recipient or sender, and also assuring users that the data has originated from the intended source. Velocity Here I'm cheating a bit by trying t...