Post

One whole year

Posted Updated
By Natalie Somersall
5 min read

It’s been a whole year since I started this website, so in the spirit of looking back, I wrote out some highlights from the post list. I’m sure there’s some eloquent prose that ChatGPT I could write about continuous improvement, “growth mindset”, and all that jazz - it’s surprising how this was all one year for only a part of the professional part of my life. 👩‍💼

A fantastic year

🎤 I spoke at three public conferences!

✏️ This is the 33rd post on this site!

👩‍💻 I made some cool open source projects

  • Kubernoodles (write up), a reference architecture I use to demonstrate a lot of “how to devops” things, mostly for actions-runner-controller within a larger business. CI is hard, Kubernetes is hard, and automation is great. 💘
  • Rolled my own cloud development environment with dev containers and VSCode server in Kubernetes - write up. This ended up being too much work compared to using local compute or an off-the-shelf product.
  • Enterprise security team (write up) scripts to manage a uniform team of people to access all security alerts in all repositories and organizations in GitHub Enterprise.

📚 I had content picked up by the corporate blog - Experiment: the hidden costs of waiting on slow build times was one of the top-performing pieces for the month it was published in, building on the business pieces here. It, as well as the pieces here, continue to perform well!

🏡 And I built fun stuff at home!

  • Added personal recipes - as we migrate out of Evernote, I still wanted to share these with friends and family. However, each new service has different sharing problems, so … it’s here, public. 👩‍🍳
  • Linux desktops for small kids from a Raspberry Pi - directions
  • OpenWRT router from a Raspberry Pi - directions

With some disappointments

It definitely wasn’t a year without some setbacks and hard realizations, though.

spaceballs

😞 There were a couple conference talk proposals that got rejected. While the opportunities could have been tons of fun, it’s mostly a relief in hindsight. This year was hectic.

🌶️ I got a little snarky about something, then received sexist comments from folks that I didn’t think saw me that way. I know more now and that’s at least better than not knowing.1

😿 Some professional disappointments that don’t warrant public mention or any further time to dwell on.

And a lot of unexpected learning

Writing this also made me learn a lot of things I never would have otherwise.

🎨 I’ve changed the theme to this site twice and done countless fiddling with it. The original goal was to try out some “web things”, so this fits.

  • Added Mermaid diagrams with a little JavaScript and messing around with the static site generator and theme (more about that here). For a few lines of JavaScript, this got tedious, so I ditched it and moved to a theme that has native support.
  • Learning the Liquid template syntax to create the recipes page with dynamic lists that update themselves based on custom front matter.
  • Did weird things with Codespaces, Obsidian, and git repos to draft and publish separately (outlined here). Again, it was much too laborious to maintain, so now I use Bear to draft and VSCode to fiddle with formatting before publishing.
  • Added basic Google Analytics to figure out a rough idea of who’s viewing what around here - I still have no idea what meaning there is in that information yet, though.

💼 Taking care of my professional presence became a priority after tech layoffs and other circumstances, I sleep better keeping things tidy here.

  • Revised my résumé, LinkedIn profile, and GitHub profile to highlight what I’ve been up to lately.
  • Wrote a speaker bio and summary to collect all the conference talks.
  • … and a calendar reminder to truly stay on top of these tasks. I hate doing all of them, yet they’re valuable.

Next year

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll2

I don’t know.

That’s okay.

More of the same seems pretty good, though. I’ll probably write about it - whatever it is - even if it isn’t much. 💖

Footnotes

  1. I wrote and rewrote this footnote more than anything else because I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about it. I hope by sharing, someone reading this knows it’s not unusual (sadly) and you’re not alone in it. You still belong in tech. 💗 ↩

  2. Here’s the link to the full book. Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for hosting public domain works all these years. Consider donating to them if you can. ↩

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.