Enjoying Work

In any job or role, white or blue collar, skilled or unskilled, you always have a period of feeling like an impostor at the beginning. You can have all the skills your industry requires but you never have the “domain knowledge” that each organisation comes with. That takes time.

The good news is that I’m finally at that good point in this current contract. Now, it’s 4 months into the 6 month contract - but it’s welcome all the same. I was having a rough time for a while there, particularly as I was having the bad luck of choosing some toxic work tickets that other people I can only guess were avoiding. Those were nightmares.

But in this last sprint I think I’ve closed something like 8 tickets with some spectacularly complex fixes like upgrading the entirety of our AWS Control Tower, fixing a LONG standing bug with a Lambda mysteriously never working on our workload accounts, and getting DEEP into some particularly gnarly AWS Service Control Policies (SCPs).

In the new sprint from tomorrow, I’ll be checking a handful of other Lambdas to ensure the recent Python runner upgrade didn’t break them.

That said

I’ve got 71 days left in this contract. I need to know by 60 days whether they’ll want to renew me or it’s off to market I go. The job market is rough currently so I can’t afford to be messed around.

Hopefully they will renew me though. I like these people and the work - and - it would be good to ride out the job market storm somewhere safe for a while.

And just some random notes

  • New business cards ordered! It’s very rare to give them out, but I like having them. I updated the design to remove the Twitter address, and to add all the weird titles my industry likes. Otherwise, these are much like my old ones. Ultra thick paper with a green color between the two sides:

New Business Cards

  • I was quiet last week as I finally migrated my entire email stack off Proton Mail to my own self-hosted mail server on docker-mailserver. I’m in the process of writing that up.

  • We just got back from a long weekend in Scotland with a quick detour through the Lake District. Had a lovely time. Did a bit of hiking, sat around in our hot tub, ate good food, and had fun with the family. Here are some pictures I took:

The Lake District Scotland Family on the Bridge Scottish Problems Honey the Highland Cow Mist over the hills Shrooms on a Dead Tree The Forest and a Mother Tree