May 24 2021
Mon 24 May 2021
Showed up to a few low-key conferences last week (Multitasking between SLOconf and o11yfest for a few days).
It felt great to be catching up with some folks I hadn't in a while -- not having the GOOG hat on was a refreshing change. It's like the manager/director/VP/whatever hat in any job you're in - you like to imagine you can show up one day and sit backwards in a chair and say you're not a manager/director/whatever for a second, but that's not how it works. So let's say that showing up to a conference as a regular punter and as a Director at a FAANG are very different experiences.
Another good sign is signing up for a few more projects at home. While the month over xmas was home-assistant, then messing with Kubernetes before throwing it out in favour of nomad, this break has been a lot more about really re-charging.
So this week, the bits arrived for one of the few projects I'm allowing myself (aside from home sysadmin). Since I'm a fan of stupidly simple interfaces, I wanted to do a 'traffic light' style interface for presence, that I can plug into Slack, or even other things (Slack is about to become a large part of my day-to-day workflow, as part of a global org, so presence is important). I know I could run Keybow OS on it and mess about with LUA, but where's the fun in that?
The RPi Zero and keybow are dinky! I dunno, I still get a kick out of really tiny things that have a full userspace on them. I might see if I can pick up a small handful of Cherry MX Blue switches, since I dont' mind those three wee buttons being clicky (I run browns in my regular keyboard).
The code I've messed about with so far is here ('anseo' means 'here' or 'present' in Irish). It also gave me a chance to actually learn more about asyncio in Python, which is a feature that appeared since the last time I wrote python code in anger, and looks much nicer than messing around with threads (so far...).