Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

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.

One evening right at the beginning of 2023, I got an email from Exercism inviting me to join The #12in23 Challenge. I was home alone and thought that this sounded like fun (you should see the number of Rubik’s cubes in this house to get an idea of how I define “fun”). I’d played with Exercism a few years ago to get myself up-to-speed in Elixir, which was looking like becoming popular when I was at Envato and I found it to be both educational and entertaining. I resolved to undertake one language per month and one exercise per day.

Let’s start this post with the assumption that synchronous, face-to-face meetings are a part of how a successful organisation operates. Reaching any other position is outside of the scope of this post, although is certainly something I would like to explore separately. Great!

In my last blog post, Keeping in the Development Loop, I listed a bunch of email newsletters that I enjoy as a technologist. Today I want to share one more email newsletter that I get a lot of value out of and that’s Better Allies ®. Each Friday (ish, depending on your timezone), Karen Catlin shares five tips on inclusion, from which I think have learned a lot. I’ll let my colleagues be the judges.

I was recently asked, “As an engineering manager, how do you keep up-to-date with what’s happening in the development world?”, which I thought was a really interesting topic and one that warranted further exploration.

This blog post has been brewing for a while now. I first started mind-mapping it about a month ago. I was going to call this “Considerate Slack Use” but this is how I use Slack and in no way a request that you do the same as me.

I’ve been enjoying Tim Ferris’ 5-Bullet Friday newsletter for the past couple of years (thanks to Jacob for the introduction). Most weeks this newsletter includes a Quote I’m pondering (this week’s didn’t, just because I was thinking about it).

In The Before Times™ we used to like to go to restaurants. Of course, part of the restaurant dining experience is being asked, “how is your meal?” Just as a forkful of said meal has entered the diner’s mouth. There’s a polite nod with the mouth covered by a hand, followed by a quiet acknowledgement, “very nice. Thank you!” And that is that. The review is acknowledged.