Many years ago I started looking into my family tree. This was hard when I was too young to drive and the main way of getting information involved travelling to a likely location and poring through old records in libraries and churches.

Thanks to the wonders of digitised records, the internet, and an Ancestry account, it got a lot easier!

Some observations thus far:

A high-level introduction to two of my favourite AWS automation tools: CloudFormation and Sceptre

Decisions are scary. Opportunity cost is scary.

From an article about some of the context behind Windows Vista comes this excellent passage on the importance of accountability transparency and clarity when it comes to decision making:

I’m a big fan of keeping track of as much as possible in a ticketing system, be it GitHub Issues or JIRA or similar.

John Cutler nicely summarises some of the value of this approach:

I believe that:

(CW: Illness)

I figured it was about time I started taking some health metrics, so I bought myself the new Fitbit Alta HR.

With sleep tracking, heart rate monitoring, reminders to move, and the obligatory step tracking, it ticked the boxes for me.

It’s been fascinating to finally measure this stuff and turn “I should probably sleep more and do more cardio” into concrete metrics and goals!

That said, when Fitbit advertise the Alta HR as a “Fitness Wristband” (rather than one of their “Smart Fitness Watches”) they mean it.

Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

In the early days of a thing, abstractions are few, and you have to manage all the incidentals too.

gtypist (technically “GNU Typist”) is a fantastic tool for learning / practising typing.

It’s been around for a while and that shows in some of its commonly packaged lessons (it’s 2017, automatic linewrap is a thing, two spaces after a full stop less so) but it does what it needs to, and is readily available and easy to use.