Remote Working: The New Normal?

With the recent surge of companies “going remote” due to the COVID-19 outbreak I thought it might be nice to share some of the things I’ve learned about remote work over the years as well as my current setup. I’m doing this in the hope that maybe it can help someone be more productive in these uncertain times.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work from home since 2016 when I joined Trello as a Site Reliability Engineer. Making the transition to remote work was initially a challenge and a totally new way of thinking, but Trello was very supportive and set me up with the skills, knowledge, and tools to succeed.

What follows are some of my recommendations for the most important things you need to succeed at remote work (most important first). If remote work truly is the “new normal” then there are some tools and practices you can employ in order to be fully effective at home.

2020 Website Refresh: More Automation Edition

It’s been over 10 months since my last blog post on here, and I decided it was high time for a fresh look at the site. Not to mention I’m on lockdown because of COVID-19. It seemed like as good a time as any to do some spring cleaning both in real life, and online.

Running Kubernetes on Ubuntu 18.04

The Endless Quest to Find the Perfect Note Taking Platform (2018 Edition)

As I have written before, I’ve used just about every note solution around. Unfortunately I haven’t found a magic bullet (yet). This post is really an exploration into the pros and cons for my own personal workflow and this the things I find important when managing notes. Hopefully after doing this exploration I can actually settle on one platform for the long haul and stop procrastinating by switching note platforms and writing blog posts about it.

Upgrading a Hugo Website from 0.27 to 0.44

This website is powered by Hugo - a static site generator written in Go. I’ve written about it before and really enjoy using it. Using Hugo, I’ve removed all the obstacles from getting content out there - now it’s just my own laziness in the way…

For years, I’ve had a Jenkins job that builds the site, uploads it to S3 and creates a CloudFront cache invalidation every time the Git repo changes. This all works great, but I haven’t updated the version of the hugo binary in my Jenkins docker image since v0.27.1. The latest version (at time of writing) is v0.44 so I figured I’d just try the new version and see what happens! Will my custom theme make it?

Things broke!

Here’s how I fixed them!