Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

Despite the title, I am not going to moan about the user interface, but rather share how I get around the strange font choices and line breaks that happen when I edit my email signature using iOS’s native Mail application. It being Better to Light a Candle Than to Curse the Darkness.

Having being contemplating a career break for a little over six months, it feels rather strange that today is my last day at work for a year. I’m keen to keep in touch, while not thinking about the day-to-day of work, so this will be my mechanism for broadcasting what I’m doing and sharing my contact details.

Five years ago this week I experienced a sudden cardiac arrest after being out for a 5 km run with the kids during Victoria’s COVID lockdowns. It’s surreal to think that half a decade has passed since that moment.

Inspired by “Desert Island Discs”, which is a long-running BBC Radio 4 programme where guests are asked to choose their favourite music tracks, a book, and a luxury item they would take with them if they were stranded on a desert island, I thought I’d write mine down. I used to listen to this many years ago when I lived in the UK and rediscovered it a few years ago on BBC Sounds. I love the concept where folks reflect on their musical tastes and the significance of certain tracks in their lives and share their stories. I’ve even had the kids listen to episodes recently.

I’m taking a 12-month career break to spend more time with my family. And before anyone worries - I’m in perfect health! This is purely about making time for what matters most.

Yes, my left arm is currently in a sling. Having described why this is multiple times, I thought I’d write it down.

Yesterday Analytics April came to an end in the Exercism #12in23 challenge and I completed my fortieth exercise in R. Given the choice of Julia, Python and R and a background including writing Python for years, I opted for the track with 30-something exercises over the one with 50-something as I had a chance of completing them all. There were a few new exercises added during the month, hence completing forty.

Hot on the heels of Functional February came Mechanical March in Exercism’s #12in23 challenge. There was a veritable feast of languages from which to choose and I opted for Go (apparently it’s not Golang despite all of the easier-to-find on the web references to the contrary. Go is one of the dominant languages in my domain at work, where tools like Docker and Kubernetes are in plentiful supply. I last played with Go in December 2012 when I was considering working for one of Go’s biggest users and remember quite liking it after years of C, C++ and Python. I remember really liking the approach of returning errors as a second return value, so that it is handled by the caller. The language was only about three years old then, so I was keen to see how it had matured.

Having really enjoyed JavaScript January, I had absolutely no idea which language I was going to choose for Month 2 of #12in23. It wasn’t until the morning of 1 February that I happened upon the relatively new jq track on Exercism. It had never occurred to me up until that point that as well as being a handy command-line tool for processing JSON, jq implements a language. It turns out that I had underestimated it, much as I had AWK all those years ago.