Where Were We?
Ah yes. So, I was getting increasingly anxious about the lack of a contract renewal despite assurances that it was in progress. There was some new “way of working” from our new job hopping director of engineering, so, I’d already quietly gone “available to work” on LinkedIn.
On Friday the 8th, exactly three weeks before the contract’s due to end, I got a message from my consultancy with bad news.
The company had explained that, due to an ongoing political power game between McKinsey and our new problematic director of engineering, they wouldn’t be renewing me. Specifically as they wanted people who were prepared to go in 5 days a week - which I won’t even consider.
So, there we are. The new folks they’ve brought in are probably good enough, but they’re mostly junior. Meanwhile, the original McKinsey devops team “lead” just keeps vanishing off the face of the earth and won’t answer their questions.
It occurred to me that maybe he never worked with a team of other engineers that he couldn’t bully and override. With this new way of working, he’s no longer a team lead. Good.
As for me, it was straight onto full-availability on LinkedIn. The response has been good so far. Fingers crossed for an interview in the next few weeks. I’m running the business reasonably well and can pay myself and the missus for several months but hopefully I can find something decent quickly.
I’ve got 1 more week of work, and as I’ve got along really well with the other engineers, I’m building a little parting gift for them - a neat tool that compiles all our vast custom-resource-definitions into 1 piece of documentation.
The Warranty’s Expired
On a different note, in the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that my toes are getting pins and needles, and there’s a numb spot in the middle of the sole of my foot. Like I’ve stepped on a piece of gum or something. In light of the diabetes this has my somewhat worried coupled with the same tingling feeling popping up in my fingers sometimes. There are other oddities as well. I don’t know what this is. So many things seem to be happening at once. I don’t know if it’s just age, the diabetes, or something worse like MS. Anyway, I’ve got an appointment for a diabetes review at the GP’s on Monday the 18th. Let’s see what they say.
The Allotment
I’ve opened the allotment for the year!
This Site
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I’ve finally wired up the business site to use this same blog format.
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I moved Gitlab from the server to my own laptop as it’s all docker based anyway. It was eating well over half my server’s memory.
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I’m experimenting with using Gitea instead as it’s lightweight. But transferring all the repos will take weeks.
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I’ve added a whole monitoring stack consisting of
- Node-exporter - to scrape all the basic server metrics.
- Cadvisor - to scrape metrics from Docker.
- Prometheus - to store the metrics.
- Grafana - to provide a single pane of glass to visualise all those metrics.
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The monitoring is wild overkill, but it’s sexy and gives me a bit of a skill refresher. I haven’t driven a monitoring stack in years. Here’s some pics:
