Three Months

Friday 1 April 2016 at 08:00 BST

It's been three months since I started this new phase of my life. Time to take stock.

Health

Here were my goals for the year, health-wise, from my post, State of Mind.

1. No sweets or processed sugar.
2. No bread or pasta.
3. No meat.
4. Exercise a little bit every day.
5. Run, climb or cycle a couple of times a week.

I made it pretty clear in that post that I expect to fail:

The reason it's a little different is because I don't mind failing. I had a sandwich for lunch on Sunday, I've had fish a few times and I'm sure I'll cave and eat a chocolate bar at some point soon. Plus, it's my birthday in a few days and if you think I'm going to step away from cake, you're joking.

I actually did manage to avoid cake on my birthday. However, sweets and chocolates have been a real problem for me in general. I'm going to renew my efforts to cut them out, but I know now that it's a lot harder than I thought it would be. I hope I can find decent substitutes to drive away the cravings.

I have managed to avoid pasta with only a few lapses. Bread was easy until I started work, at which point it started to get harder. I know I can do it though, and writing this post is as much of a reminder to me that I still want to make these changes as it is an evaluation.

In January, I had very little meat. In February, I had a lot. Now I'm back to a fairly small amount—a couple of days per week have meat in them—and I'm loving it. I feel healthier.

I'm exercising, but not every day. I managed every single day in January, but starting full-time work near the beginning of February put a stop to that. I'm currently averaging a couple times per week. I've found that mornings really aren't my thing, no matter how much I really want to exercise then, so I'm going to start looking into lunchtime or after-work gym classes instead.

Consulting

I'm currently working full-time at a client, and it's going very well. My focus is on automating all the things, but I'm also working on features and dealing with customers. It's a Ruby/Node.js/React project, which is a fun set, even if I miss my static types, and I've had a great opportunity to work with Google Cloud Platform, especially Kubernetes and the Container Engine. (Spoiler: it works really well. I'm shocked.)

I expect I'll be at this client for a while longer, if they'll have me, but I'd also like to start looking at small-scale consulting around testing, continuous delivery, robustness and resilience as well. I've done a little already at the weekends and really enjoyed it. It's a fantastic opportunity to find out how different teams work, the sorts of tools they use and the problems they run into on a daily basis.

Open-Source

I worked on two personal open-source projects in the last few months:

• Smoke, an integration test framework for console applications.
• safe-promises, a library that forces you to handle errors in JavaScript promises.

I rewrote the Haplo Safe View Templates build system so that Maven handles all the things, rather than a collection of scripts and checked-in dependencies.

I also contributed a tiny amount to SDKMAN!, an installation manager for JVM SDKs such as Scala and Groovy. I really want to give more of a hand to that particular project if I can. My goal is to get it installing the JVM itself on Mac OS X so that I can keep it up-to-date automatically, and I'm told they're half-way there already.

I'm pretty awful at contributing to open-source software most of the time. I like to write my own code and put it online, but I don't really add to stuff that's already out there. This is something I want to improve upon. GitHub makes it so easy to fork some software, make some changes and raise a pull request that it's almost a crime not to.

Moving House

On Sunday, I'll be moving. Nowhere exciting—I'm going back to my parents, mostly because my flatmates are going to be a proper married couple in their new house. I decided to split moving out from moving in, so I'll start hunting for a new place in a month or so when I feel like I have more time.

The Blog, Itself

I think things are going well. I have more readers than ever, by an order of magnitude—over a thousand people have set eyes on these pages this month. It started off pretty high-level, but right now I'm down in the weeds of automating everything, which I'm loving—I can't help but get a thrill whenever I find a quirky little feature of Docker, Bash or Java that I've not seen anyone else talk about before.

With that said, I'm going to take a break. Writing those Docker posts is exhausting and it's spilling over into time I should be spending sleeping. I'll be writing, but not every day. The Docker series probably has a couple more posts in it which I'll try and get out next week, but no promises, because of the aforementioned move.

I'd like to look into making screencasts too. I know that a lot of my more technical posts would probably be better as a video for some people, and I really want to make the content as accessible as possible. Writing long-form is my default state, but I think I can handle alternatives.

The Next Three Months

Here's the plan: move back to my parents', get back to being healthier, put more content online, write more open-source code, and be awesome at my job. Not necessarily in that order.