My First Year

I just celebrated my one year anniversary in my current position, which is a great opportunity to look back on the last year of work. This role has been unlike any other that I have had in my career starting from the interview.

When I was interviewing with my boss and we were discussing what I did in my previous role, I discussed the architecture that we had built. It was a traditional Spring application that was a monolith. It was a very well designed layered architecture. We were doing a mix Trunk Based Development and feature branch development depending on how large and invasive the feature was using git as the repository. We had a great unit test suite and did weekly deployments. We tried to commit early to master and use feature toggles to role out new features and mitigate risk. They were still largely a waterfall model though, just a company that moved faster on waterfall than any I have ever worked with.

As we are at the end of the Easter Octive I realized that I have been remiss to give an update on how the intermittent fasting went for Lent. From Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday I only ate between the hours of 6pm and 10pm.

Overall I found that after a day or 2 your body adapts and you don’t really get hungry during the day. The exception to this was Saturdays. Since Catholic’s can’t eat meat on Friday’s during lent the food that I consumed did not keep me as full. Additionally I have more time on Saturdays and I think there is a natural habit to munch sometimes when bored or just hanging around the house.

Lent

Lent is here and I decided to go with the intermittent fasting that I had been considering. First as previously mentioned, I was doing the slow carb diet. Between January 9th and March 1st I went from 251 pounds to 228.8 pounds. And that wasn’t adhering too closely to the diet. For example the diet has you eating smaller meals every three hours and that is something I struggle with. It doesn’t really work for me. So I was just eating 2-4 meals a day depending on the day. At the beginning close to 4 and by the end just 2. Also in that time frame, we celebrated my wife’s birthday, our wedding anniversary, and my daughter’s birthday all of which involved breaking the diet to some degree. I think if I had stuck close to the diet I could have lost that weight in 6 weeks based on the rate that I was losing early on before family obligations came into play. But at the end of the day if you can’t cheat here and there to celebrate the important things in life, that is no way to live. And Slow Carb is definitely a system that if you stick to it most of the time will work for you even with the built in cheats.

I came across another article on hackernews about the benefits of fasting. It seems that as more and more time goes by the evidence grows that intermittent fasting has enormous health benefits. This story is even more amazing from the diabetic standpoint and the regenerating your pancreas.

Then my coworker sent me this video which I also think is good food for thought:

This got me thinking that maybe I should try the one meal a day thing throughout lent this year and see how that goes. I was already considering closing it out with another 72 hour fast. Though this year I am not going to fast from coffee I found that I was too mentally foggy in the afternoons without it. So given that I like to experiment anyway spending a bit over a month just having maybe supper every day and coffee (black) in the morning I think will be a good test to see how this actually would work lifestyle wise. I haven’t decided for sure whether I will go with that or not (I don’t have to decide until Wednesday morning), but that is the direction that I am leaning right now.

Introduction

I came across this post on linked in and it was too good to not share. The author highlights all the benefits of starting a blog. The key thing he mentions is that you accrue all these benefits even if no one reads your blog. I have found all of this to be true in my personal life. I have very few readers of this blog, but in the end I write this blog for me and not for someone else.

Sorry for the lack of updates. We have been busy working on a game changing micro service for our business. It has been a blast but a couple of crazy sprints. I hope to get back to more writing in the near future.

Introduction

As is my tradition on this blog this is my annual post for my Themes for the year. Why themes and not goals? I feel like if you don’t hit your goals that feels like a failure, but as witnessed by my recap of last year I did a poor job of hitting my themes and was still very happy with how the year turned out. Themes are designed to be open ended and the idea is just an accountability tool for myself to make sure I am working on personal and professional growth. In the case of last year my life changes resulted in many of the themes not making sense anymore, but I still felt like there was a ton of growth so I call it a successful year.

End of year recap

It’s that time again. Time to reflect on my themes for the year and see how I did on them. This is an annual tradition of mine to see how I am doing in general. I find it is a useful accountability tool for myself to make sure I am not wasting too much time on unimportant things and am spending the time that I would like on personal development.

The Upgrade Process

I finally got around to upgrading my web server from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04.1. I decided to jot down my experiences in case anyone else runs into these issues.

Preparation

The first thing I did prior to doing the upgrade was to run updraft plus to backup the Blog’s database and files. After that finished I logged into the Amazon EC2 console and created an image of my AMI. This way in the worst case scenario that I trashed my image I could just boot the backup image and be where I was before I began.

Today I learned is just going to be me making a note of something interesting that I learned that might be useful for other people. I actually learned this two days ago from a coworker, but it is something I don’t want to forget.

Apparently modern browsers (at least Firefox and Chrome which is what I tested on) support putting a statement anywhere in your javascript file that is just: