First episode of 2021! We’re in lockdown number 3 in England!

Jon admits to writing a private-only diary using WordPress (he doesn’t mention he also has a separate photo diary). Jerry mentions that another of his friends also has recently started a diary using WordPress, and suggests that maybe this is a new trend.

Jon is also Internet Famous due to a post he made on StatusNet in 2009 (mirrored to twitter) that got captured in the screenshot of a StatusNet client and posted to Wikipedia.

Jon wrote a post on his blog talking about how he got into his career. He would encourage anyone else to write something similar, particularly if they’ve taken an unusual route into their career!

Al asks the team what he should learn about. He talks about the tooling they’re using – Bamboo, Azure DevOps, Terraform, Ansible. We talk a bit about what Bamboo is, what a code pipeline entails, and how they’ve used it. Jon mentions that Lorna Jane Mitchell talks about moving from Travis to Github Actions on her Twitch Stream. We then drill into using Terraform modules.

Jon mentions about “Architecture Decision Records” and cites files in the gov.uk public repo as an example of this. It’s similar in principle to IETF RFCs. He found it via the Last Week in AWS newsletter issue 195 (which at the time of writing was only available to subscribers). He mentions the tooling (“adr-tools“) which you can use to write these records.

Al then asks where we find time to learn. We all talk about what we do, some at more length than others.

Al talks about being OK about being alone. He mentions about his life coach, the “Alonement” podcast, and the talk he gave at OggCamp about staying positive on a digital world.

Jon then reminds our listeners to check in with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours to make sure they’re OK.