I've seen a few people doing these month-in-review type posts and I thought I could get onboard with the idea. I've been doing year in review posts but there's a lot of fine details that disappear in such a broad time-period. Im not entirely sure how I plan on structuring this but

Work Activity

Work has been very busy with us building and releasing an integrated operations platform.

To briefly cover it, we build a sensor that get's installed on sites. There can be as few as 100 or more than 1000 that can get installed, but these devices are not IoT based. They are isolated to customer networks, which means in general we don't have direct access to them. We need to go through jump boxes to access them. There is also a lot of churn with sensors being replaced and being able to get a global view of firmware versions, health details ect.

In the past we've used a Slackbot that we would install on the jump box and people would access there. It works okay but it's not perfect and doesn't allow for us to integrate a global view of the world. Each site is still very independent. Add that you can only do so much within the UI of Slack.

So what we did, and I'm quite proud of this, is replace the Slackbot that get's installed on site with a SaltStack engine. This is something we already have installed at all of the sites and allows us to use all the features of Salt within the engine. It's an exceptionally powerful tool to use.

I don't really want to dig any deeper into it here, but will follow up with a post later.

I just want to highlight that after a month of hard work we're officially moving this into beta phase!

Not Much Exercise

I picked back up biking after a couple months off due to injury and COVID illness. It was pretty rough at first to be honest but after the first week I was getting right back up into the pace I was at when I stopped.

About two weeks in though I hurt my shoulder somehow, because the older you get, the more just getting out of bed can apparently injure you. I took a break for about a week to let that heal and then I injured my hip laying flooring in my wife's studio.

I really have not exercised much at all, and I will be pushing to pick that back up now that my body has decided to stop injuring itself.

From Three Monitors to One

I never thought I would ever transition from three or two monitors to one. I've seen other people comment how they did and it just seemed crazy to me.

I have been using the same three 24" 1080p monitors for a good number of years now and losing all that screen real estate.

In the end though in January I shifted from three monitors to one. I went from 3 24" 1080p monitors to 1 49" curved ultra-wide and I tell you what, this monitor looks ridiculous but I absolutely love it.

Seriously it's a game changer for me and at first I wasn't sure about having a curved screen but, to be honest after using it, it's absolutely awesome.

Personal Growth

It's been kind of a mixed month for me. I've struggled a bit with depression and anxiety. I've also noticed my overall alcohol consumption higher than I would like it to be, which I'm sure is related.

I've been trying to learn to accept myself better, which is not always the easiest thing to do.

I did manage to get past my anxiety and get my new ear piercings which I'm super happy for as it's something I've wanted to do for a long time.

Overall though I think a combination of work stress, fear and self doubt have not made this a very strong month in the progress department.

Still take the steps forward you can make even if you sometimes have to take steps back.