Author: virtualwolf

New job!

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No, I haven’t left Atlassian, but come Monday I’m starting in a new role!

We have the concept of a role called a “Shield” that’s essentially support but for helping our own internal developers and users (as opposed to external customers), and the idea is that it’s the first point of contact for developers who need help or have questions about the particular service/platform/whatever that the Shield is supporting, as well as being able to step back and look at the bigger picture in terms of pain points that those developers run into and what sort of things could be done to minimise that. The name “shield” comes from the fact that you’re essentially shielding the rest of the developers on the team from the distractions that come from other people constantly contacting them throughout the day, and letting them get on with what they do best (actual coding and improvements to the product). I’ll also have the opportunity to actually do some coding and make improvements too, though. \o/

The team I’m joining runs our internal microservices platform that an increasing number of our applications are being run on, and though the microservices themselves can be pretty much any language you’d like (it’s all Docker-based), the code that the platform itself runs on is Node.js which ties in rather nicely with all my learning over it over the past almost eighteen months.

I’ve been doing external customer-facing support for over thirteen and a half years so this is going to be a lovely change! It’s going to be really weird starting anew where I know next to nothing about the inner workings of the thing I’m supporting though. 😛 I expect my brain is going to be dribbling out my ears come the end of next week.

Back to Tasmania

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We went back to Tasmania again last week, and it was pretty great!

Where last time we stayed in Hobart for the whole trip, this time we drove up to Bicheno first, which is about a two and a half hour drive north of Hobart. The accomodation itself (the “Diamond Island Retreat”) was not great, the house was built in probably the 1970s and had clearly had next to nothing done with it since. The kitchen was terrible and the two frying pans were both quite burnt and scratched up, and there was zero internet access (at least in terms of wifi, thankfully there was plenty of 4G reception). It was completely clean and tidy, at least.

That being said, the location was amazing. This was the view from the back deck –

Diamond Island

You could walk down the paddock and down to the beach, which had some of the whitest sand I’ve seen. The first sunset was pretty epic as well.

Sunset

Reflections

Walking

More patterns

They do “penguin tours” right near where we were staying, there’s a whole section of land that’s restricted to the public and they get lots of penguins living and breeding there. We went during the decidedly off-season and so only saw a couple of penguins, but one of them waddled its way up the beach and right past us to its burrow! The other penguins we could only see in the distance down on the rocks near the beach. The tours are done after the sun has set and the guides have special torches that emit really yellow light so as not to hurt the penguins’ eyes. During the breeding season you can apparently see upwards of a hundred penguins all coming ashore to feed their chicks.

There’s a few other things to do around Bicheno as well, one is Freycinet National Park which has some epic hiking trails through it (neither Kristina nor I are hikers so we opted to just go by what we could reach by car).

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Cape Tourville Lighthouse

Then right up the road from where we were staying is Douglas-Apsley National Park, which is the same deal as Freycinet with the hiking, and requires a good couple of kilometres of dirt road to get to the carpark.

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(There’s a few more photos from each in the photoset).

The last bit of Bicheno we saw was East Coast Natureworld, a big wildlife sanctuary and conservation area.

Esther the wombat

Emu

Lazing

Ostrich

Don’t ask me why there was an ostrich there, I don’t know. 😛 The baby wombat at the top is named Esther, and she was just sitting there in the keeper’s arms dozing while the keeper was talking. They also do conservation and breeding for Tasmanian devils there, and we got to see one of them being fed which was pretty neat!

Feeding Dennis the Tasmanian Devil

Nom nom nom

After that, we drove back down to Hobart and spent the rest of the trip just wandering around some more.

The side path

190

Up the hill

Mirror selfie

Lit from below

Aurora Australis

Grafitti

Happy doggo grafitti

Under construction

Docked

The huge orange ship is an icebreaker –

Aurora Australis is an Australian icebreaker. Built by Carrington Slipways and launched in 1989, the vessel is owned by P&O Maritime Services, but is regularly chartered by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) for research cruises in Antarctic waters and to support Australian bases in Antarctica.

And it’s quite an impressive sight in person!

We also went up to Mount Nelson, which is the next-highest mountain in Hobart, but unfortunately they were doing hazard-reduction burns (basically controlled bushfires) so it was really smokey and you mostly couldn’t see anything. 🙁

Despite that, all in all it was an excellent trip.

iPhoneography

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Both Kristina and I upgraded to the iPhone 7 last month, I’d heard the camera was good but I took it out for a spin last week when I went on a lunchtime photo walk with some co-workers, and man. I can see why the point-and-shoot market is dying! I processed all these photos in Lightroom on my iMac so it wasn’t solely done on the iPhone, but even so, I’m incredibly impressed.

It’s not going to replace a full DSLR setup in low-light or shallow depth-of-field situations, but where I’d be wandering around during the day taking photos at f/8 anyway…

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A year of Node.js

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Today marks one year exactly since switching my website from Perl to Javascript/Node.js! I posted back in March about having made the switch, but at that point my “production” website was still running on Perl. I switched over full-time to Node.js shortly after that post.

From the very first commit to the latest one:

$ git diff --stat 030430d 6b7c737
[...]
177 files changed, 11313 insertions(+), 2110 deletions(-)

Looking back on it, I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in that one single year! I have—

  • Written a HipChat add-on that hooks into my Ninja Block data (note the temperature in the right-hand column as well as the slash-commands; the button in the right-hand column can be clicked on to view the indoor and outdoor temperatures and the extremes for the day)
  • Refactored almost all of the code into a significantly more functional style, which has the bonus of making it a hell of a lot easier to read
  • Moved from callbacks to Promises, which also massively simplified things (see the progression of part of my Flickr– and HipChat-related code)
  • Completely overhauled my database schema to accomodate the day I eventually replace my Ninja Block with my Raspberry Pi (the Ninja Block is still running though, so I needed to have a “translation layer” to take the data in the format that the Ninja Block sends and converts it to what can be inserted in the new database structure)
  • Added secure, signed, HTTP-only cookies when changing site settings
  • Included functionality to replace my old Twitter image hosting script, and also added a nice front-end to it to browse through old images

Along with all that, I’ve been reading a lot of software engineering books, which have helped a great deal with the refactoring I mentioned above (there was a lot of “Oh god, this code is actually quite awful” after going through with a fresh eye having read some of these books)—Clean Code by Robert C. Martin, Code Complete by Steve McConnell, The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell and Trevor Foucher.

I have a nice backlog in JIRA of new things I want to do in future, so I’m very interested to revisit this in another year and see what’s changed!

Farewell Dreamhost

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After 12 years of service, I’m shutting my Dreamhost account down (for those unaware, Dreamhost is a website and email hosting service).

My very first—extremely shitty—websites were hosted on whichever ISP we happened to be using at the time—Spin.net.au, Ozemail, Optus—with an extremely professional-looking URL along the lines of domain.com.au/~username. I registered virtualwolf.org at some point around 2001-2002 and had it hosted for free on a friend’s server for a few years, but in 2005 he shut it down so I had to go find some proper hosting, and that hosting was Dreamhost.

The biggest thing I found useful as I was dabbling in programming was that Dreamhost offered PHP and MySQL, so I was able to create dynamic sites rather than just static HTML. Of course, looking back at the code now is horrifying, especially the amount of SQL injection vulnerabilities I had peppered my sites with.

Around the start of 2011, I started using source control—Subversion initially—and finally had a proper historical record of my code. I used PHP for the first year or so of it, then ended up outgrowing that and switched to a Perl web framework called Mojolicious. The only option to run a long-lived process on Dreamhost is to use Fast-CGI, which I never managed to get working with Mojolicious, but fortunately Mojolicious could also run as a regular CGI script so I was still able to use it with Dreamhost, albeit not at great speed.

At the same time I started using Subversion, I also signed up with Linode who offer an entire Linux virtual machine with which you can do almost anything you’d like as you have full root access. I originally used it mostly to run JIRA so I could keep track of what I wanted to do with my website and have the nifty Subversion/JIRA integration working to see my commits against each JIRA issue. I slowly started using the Linode for more and more things (and switched to Git instead of Subversion as well), until in 2014 I moved my entire website hosting over to the Linode.

At that point the only thing I was using Dreamhost for was hosting Kristina’s website and WordPress blog, and the email for our respective domains. Dreamhost’s email hosting wasn’t always the most reliable and towards the end of 2015 they had more than their usual share of problems, so we started looking for alternatives. Kristina ended up moving to Gmail and I went with FastMail (who I am extremely happy with and would very highly recommend!), I moved her blog and my previously-LiveJournal-but-now-Wordpress-blog over to the Linode, and that was that!

Moving my website hosting to the Linode also allowed me to move over to Node.js and I’ve been going full steam ahead ever since. Since that posted I’ve moved over from callbacks to Promises (so much nicer), I wrote myself a HipChat add-on to keep an eye on the temperature that my Ninja Block is reporting, and I moved my dodgy Twitter image upload Perl script functionality into my site and added a nice front-end to it. Even looking back at my code from 6 months ago to now shows a marked increase in quality and readability.

So in summary, thanks for everything Dreamhost, but I outgrew you. 🙂

Final enkitchening, and concert

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We had the tiler out this morning to put the backsplash in, and the kitchen is basically finished now. The bits above the cupboards still need painting, but in terms of every day use, it’s done, and looks brilliant! The plumbing and electrics were all hooked up yesterday, and you have no idea how delightful it is to actually have a dishwasher now after three-and-a-half years of not having one.

We’ve not used the new induction cooktop properly in anger yet, but we made pasta last night, I put the “Boost” mode on, and it took the water from cold to a roiling boil in five minutes flat. I also seasoned the stainless steel frying pans that we bought from IKEA and had written off as being useless because they stick (apparently seasoning is essential) though they’ve not been put to the test yet. The only casualty in the change to induction is the wok, which despite having a fridge magnet stick to the bottom of it, isn’t sensed by the cooktop. Kristina did a bunch of reading and the best type to get is a carbon steel one, so we’ve got one on the way.

Backsplash 1

Backsplash 2

I also saw Lacuna Coil live last night, for the first time in seven years (due to them not having toured here in that long), and they absolutely ruled. They played all the songs I was hoping for. ? I saw them back in 2007 as well, and was a fair bit closer then but with a significantly crappier phone camera (and also a far far higher tolerance for shitty photos, evidently). 😛 Irritatingly, I had to leave half-way through the last song or I was going to miss the last train home due to there being trackwork this weekend. I’m currently running on about five hours of sleep because I didn’t get home until just before 1:30am, and woke up at 6:40am because the tiler was coming. Note to self, don’t schedule things early on a Saturday morning in future.

Lacuna Coil 1

Lacuna Coil 2

Lacuna Coil 3

Lacuna Coil 4

Lacuna Coil 5

The Enkitchening, Part 3

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The benchtops were installed today, and the sink and cooktop put into place, though neither were hooked up.

You guys, it’s starting to look like we have a real kitchen now!

Benchtops 1

Benchtops 2

The cooktop was about the same size as our previous one, perhaps slightly narrower due to not needing the control knobs on the side, but it looks hilariously smaller since the benches are so much larger.