Pete Johns - Blog entries of the highest uptodateness

The revelation of the “Collection #1” data breach highlights, once again, that we do a poor job of keeping ourselves safe online. January is a good time for setting personal goals and if I could recommend one goal for you, it would be to improve your online security. I’m not a security professional but my work involves online identity management and I find our community’s behaviours fascinating. This blog post contains free, unsolicited advice, so you are guaranteed value for money but do give it some consideration.

Today I was trying to make a simple change to a Git repository, privately hosted with GitHub. I cloned the repository, made the change and went to push it up for review. The git push didn’t succeed and I thought maybe I had fat fingered the remote URL when I cloned the repository (but that couldn’t be right because I’d successfully cloned the repository, right?). I tried removing and re-adding the remote but still “no dice”, as they say.

Over the last few years I’ve come to really enjoy running. I typically run three or four times per week with one of these runs being a long run, at least 21.1km. After my first marathon I agreed with my family that I’d not spend such of my weekend doing long runs and formed a habit of getting up very early on a Friday morning for these runs, usually with a couple of my Merri Creek Running Club friends.

It’s a sad day. Today I rode to work for the last time. I still love bicycles. I still love cycling. But I love life more.

Since I started cycling to work a couple of years ago, I have come to love and fear cycling in Melbourne in almost equal measure.

Having spent a lot of 2015 focussed on running, I thought it might be nice to do my first bike-based event in 2016 — I enjoy being out on my bikes and have often wondered how far I could go in a single outing. I made a note to myself: “Made for distance, not for speed” and this applies equally to running as cycling (and probably swimming, too). I’ve no real desire to go as fast as I can on a bike, so races held no appeal. Part of the beauty of cycling, for me, is taking in the surroundings.

My intention when I revived this blog at the beginning of the year was to write more about the world of software development and delivery. Yet I find myself writing about my relatively recently discovered pastime of running for the third consecutive post.

I haven’t looked back since I ran my first parkrun last June. You may remember I mentioned parkrun once or twice in my year of running. It gets me out of bed of a Saturday morning (hence encouraging me not to over-indulge after work on a Friday), it has helped me improve my running and I’ve made some good friends through it.

Today, I ran as part of a Corporate Triathlon relay team with my amazing colleagues. Had you told me a year ago that I would be doing this, I’m not sure I would have believed you. This is the story of how I got there…

I’ve decided to return to blogging in 2015 with something I wrote in May 2012. This was written for a publication of one of my former colleagues, “Light Bulb Bites”.