Categories
Meta quick

I’m a writer Mom

I’m sitting at a table of people I mostly don’t know, and it’s gradually became clear that almost everyone here is “I work in IT”.

I try not to say “I work in IT”, fail, then try to describe what I actually do, and fail again. It doesn’t sit well with me. Hosted on AWS blah. If I said Carpenter, Architect etc etc, you might know what I do, or have an idea anyway. Shit, even “Software engineer” makes some sense.

So, my goal is to be a writer. Creating gives a good feeling, and is challenging in a different way. It’s not problem solving, it’s not fixing the world’s problems, or even understanding them; it’s creating something that, at best, is a mirror held up to the world. Maybe a funhouse mirror. I have written all my life, on and off, but have never being…. a Writer.

Listening to “slip of the keyboard” by Terry Pratchett; He always started a new book as soon as his last was finished, because if he wasn’t writing, then calling himself a writer was cheating.

So I’m flipping this over and saying as long as I’m writing…. I’m a writer.

Categories
personal quick

Improve your Zoom

Just a quick note, try playing some music in the background next time if you are in a zoom meeting (or teams or whatever). You can usually adjust the volume down low compared to the zoom audio. People on the call can’t here it on your headset, and it can really make the meeting nicer.

I like a bit of chill electro to add a bit of background noise. Try a cinematic score to liven up a boring meeting a bit 🙂
eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HC9ULm4HquU

Categories
Python

Importance of being defensive when contacting external services

I just got caught by a “reliable” internal service which started to give timeouts.

I never configured a timeout on the connection (default was many minutes) which jammed the whole program.
It’s important to set aggressive timeouts in prod, better to error and figure out a way to accommodate the error than just wait.

Perhaps the next step is to make my program internally defensive in order to combat my poor coding skills.