This Week’s Program: June 13 - June 17

It’s a special week in This Week’s Program! One year ago this week I started to write some code. And then I committed some code the next day. Then the day after that. Then the weekend came and I didn’t write code. But then I was right back to it on Monday.

I’ve been writing code out in public every weekday for one year, with an occasional break here and there.

It wasn’t until October that I began logging the work that I was doing in this newsletter. It’s been really rewarding. My short blog post has a good summary of what I’ve accomplished in this year.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Streaks are a great way to build habits.
• Deliberate practice is how you get good at something.
• Doing things in public helps you hold yourself accountable.
• Regularly articulating the things you’ve done helps you measure progress.
• It’s important to take breaks.
• Making tiny, incremental progress delivering a thing is better than trying to conceptualize it entirely up-front.
• To-Do lists, GTD®, the Pomodoro Technique, etc. are all useful techniques and tools, but they require habit-building unto themselves. Optimizing for meta-productivity is probably not useful.

Okay here’s some code.

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I spent a bunch of time this week reading through using AWS CloudFormation, and had a bunch of commits building out a template. I still haven’t spun up a Stack with this template, yet, but I’m taking my time reading through CloudFormation best practices and the different resources available. I think I migh really like CloudFormation.

An alternative to CloudFormation is Hashicorp’s Terraform. I’m not quite ready to leave AWS island, but I can see Terraform being useful for other projects down the line.

It’s been tough to swallow that the days of making neat sounds in Clojure are behind me and that my new focus is DevOps. On the one hand, I know that this is stuff that is very important and interesting and useful and I’m going to be a better programmer knowing these tools and techniques. On the other hand, it’s not holding my interest like some of the creative explorations and language studies. DevOps is the Kale of programming.

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For a little respite from DevOps Kale I started hacking around on my personal website here and there. Here, I’m exploring using a Jekyll hook to publish to a 3rd party (Medium but I’m only halfway serious).

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After a bunch of spikes in the Jekyll hook direction I decided that the generator approach might be for the best, but I decided to clean up a lot of the code around publishing to Tumblr. I’m not sure if this code works entirely, just yet, but I’ll likely borrow some of the patterns here for Tinyletter publishing.

That’s all for now. Here’s to another year of writing code 🍻!

– Mark