On the 28th of September 2023, I presented at my very first virtual conference.

I presented on Track 3 for Customer/ User perspectives at the Kong API Summit 2023. This session was recorded and is available on the event platform until September 2024. Kong have uploaded the Key Notes to their own YouTube channel, however, the sessions (including my own) shared as part of each track will only be available on their platform.

They've kindly shared the full recording with me, which I've uploaded to our Adventure channel as an unlisted video. That means that you can only watch the recording if you have the link (embedded below) or if I've sent you the link.

Abstract

CircleCI is one of the world's most popular CI/CD solutions. Donna will share CircleCI's journey to standardise their API infrastructure with Kong, from deprecating old proxies to minimising the impact of potentially long-running incidents. This talk will cover how CircleCI streamlined its internal developer experience and the benefits they've realised from offering improved observability, enhanced security, and more.

If you've watched my session and would like to know more then please feel free to reach out. You can find my contact details on my About Me page!

We've just returned from 5 days at #CCCamp23, it is hosted every four years just north of Berlin and this year was our first time attending. What is this camp?

The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms.

It's hard to put into words what CCCamp was truly like without attending it yourself, but there's a sense of mystery and discovery about it. People bring their inventions, gadgets, all sorts of displays for campers to enjoy. It's the kind of place that you can buy an ethernet cable from an old cigarette vending machine while walking by an old rusty digger and tents covered in LED lights.

It's also the kind of place where you can drink with people who have travelled from all over Europe to celebrate 30 years of the Debian Linux distribution. Someone we know may or may not have donated an Ubuntu installation disk to the cause, but you didn't hear that from me.

The event was hosted in August, so a combination of emergency blankets attached to our tents, and regular dips in the lake attemped to keep us cool while we balanced drinking copious amounts of cold water and Tschunk (a cocktail consisting of sugar, lime, rum, and club mate).

This event wasn't only about networking, hacking, drinking, and LED lights however. There were talks happening over the whole week from a huge variety of experts in their field, some of the talks we attended included:

• Surviving DDoS attacks
• Using NixOS as a replacement Android mobile operating system
• Hacktivism
• Physical vulnerability research (advanced lock picking!)
• Identifying social engineering
• Obtaining secret TETRA primitives through police radio jailbreaking
• Understanding industrial coffee machines
• Ethical hacking
• OnTrack Demo party
• PID loops: self-balancing robots

There were so many others, but these are some of the sessions that stood out to me. If you're interested in watching any of the sessions for yourself, they should all be available here.

Photo dump from our time at CCCamp:

The community around these camps and events are what keeps bringing us back for more. I first heard about something like this when my friend Ottilia (featured in many of these photos) had her talk on Anti-Surveillance Knitting accepted for ElectroMagneticField (EMF) camp 2022 in the South of England. We had an amazing experience, made some great friends, and learned of CCCamp. By which point, we couldn't pass up the opportunity to go to an even bigger camp and travel abroad to do so. It makes it even better that at CCCamp there is a village for the EMF Camp organisers, complete with the Scottish consulate and Irish embassy villages which are staples at these events.

Thank you to everyone who made this a wonderful experience, here's hoping we can make it back again in 4 years time, and meet many of the regulars at other events in between. Next stop: EMFCamp 2024.

I've always enjoyed going to conferences. Learning from people who have wisdom or cool stories to share. I'm excited to announce (to anyone who might stumble by my blog) that I'll be presenting at this year's API Summit 2023 by Kong myself!

This will be my first time presenting at a conference talk, and I'm a little nervous. I've presented many times at internal conferences and meetings, but this will by far be the biggest public speaking event I've done (so far). It's also a free, virtual, conference! So anyone can register to join the sessions.

It helps that my session will be focused on something I'm passionate about, and that I've spent the last two years of my career working on. I've also got a wonderful group of people to support me in preparing for success with this presentation!

My talk title: Sparking API Joy: A journey to confidently shipping APIs

I'd like to provide a little context on why this is such a huge step for me: growing up, people thought I was mute because I was so shy.

Anyone that knows me now will likely read that sentence again and wonder whose blog they are actually on, because I have definitely grown out of that. I have since developed a reputation for bringing people together, being a force which can get work done, and generally the opposite of quiet (in both social and work settings). Doing a conference talk is different though, I've been actively putting myself in positions where I can build my public speaking skills for years, and I'm excited (and very nervous) to take another step on this journey!

Who knows, maybe I'll become a regular conference speaker. 🤓

One of the things I always dread when taking any length of time off is trying to catch up on all the things that have happened while I was out. A few days is nothing, but anything longer than a week I feel some level of anxiety around taking the time off, knowing that there will be a whole lot waiting for me when I get back.

As I finish up for over two weeks off, this time around I've put measures in place to try and make catching up much less painful.

Create a Catch-Up Doc - Before You Go

This might seem like putting the horse before the cart, but hear me out.

Recently, my manager returned from a 5-month sabbatical, and in preparation for her return one of my colleagues started a "while you were gone doc" to give her a starting point on the things that are worth knowing/watching/reading. This included highlights, incidents, or anything she might have found interesting.

Since then, it's become a "thing" that my team does: if you're taking a week or more off and you would like a catch-up doc for when you return, you are responsible for starting the document before you go and asking the rest of the team to keep it updated.

I've started one before taking off this time, creating a bunch of sections (and setting up a template for others to use, obviously).

My catch-up document consists of the following sections:

Expectations
I like to make it clear what the expectations are while I'm gone: usually that I'm not going to be thinking about work, or contactable via Slack or Email while I'm gone. I also make a point of providing alternative contacts while I'm gone if something can't wait, someone from my team will absolutely be able to help.

Dates
How long will I be away, and what day can I be expected to return?

Action Items
What do I need to do first? Is there a security update I need to do immediately, or forms to fill in?

Recordings
Many of my team meetings are recorded for the benefit of anyone who is not available, and also for re-watching depending on the importance of the meeting. These meetings are usually available for 3 months before they expire.

Readings
Were there any decision records, or documents produced while I was gone? What about interesting threads to read, or pull requests to read over?

Highlights
Did anything awesome happen while I was gone? Did that deprecation we've been working on finally get over the line? Tell me something to spark some joy!

Lowlights
Were there any incidents? Did something not go as expected? One thing I hope not to see in these sections is that someone is leaving or has left while I'm away.

Miscellaneous
Was there anything else that doesn't fit into the other sections? Anything else the team can think of to dump in the document and make sure it doesn't get lost in the void?

This kind of document only works if the team are on board with the idea, as it's really up to the team how much detail goes in there. I'm very lucky right now with a team that takes the time to regularly update these documents, and if they don't update it as they go, someone will usually panic fill it in at the last moment which is wonderful.

Declaring Bankruptcy

This goes hand in hand with the catch-up document... If it's not in the document, or in my immediate team channel(s), it will be marked as read and I will move on. If anything is really that important, and I've missed it then I'm sure it will come up again and I'll see it then. There's only so much time you can commit to catching up, and for your own sanity (particularly if you lurk in many channels) is to accept there will be things you don't catch up on.

Except for the #dogs channel, I will always go back through all posts in there. 🐾

I love describing the different types of fun activities, and it's safe to say that for me climbing mountains definitely falls into the category of "Type 2" fun. I've heard people describe it before, but it wasn't until we really started our Munro bagging journey that I really began to appreciate the different classifications of fun.

So... what are the different categories?

Type 1

Fun fun. The type of fun that makes your heart happy at the moment, and you just know you are having fun. Plain and simple.

I'm talking about eating your favourite food, hanging out with your friends, and laughing until your cheeks hurt, fun.

Your mileage may vary, but you know the kind of fun I mean.

Type 2

At the time, you are miserable. You feel sweaty, painful, and overall uncomfortable. You wonder how you got into this situation, and say you'll never do this again. Until the next day, when you're looking back and all you can think about are the views or giggle when you remember the moment your partner slipped in a bog. The kind of activity that is fun when you look back on it.

Why Munro bagging falls into this category for me: my muscles scream at me all day, I'm reminded of how unfit I am, getting stuck in bogs, and my feet are in so much pain trying to stumble back to the van. Finishing up the day feeling nothing but pain... and yet, within 24 hours we're plotting our next adventure.

This is the addictive kind of fun, and I'm all for it.

Type 3

You are not having fun at all. Hindsight cannot help this kind of fun, and you tell your friends and family to never let you do that again. On our most recent hike, we categorised the return journey as Type 3 (going as far as creating a Type 4 to describe it as almost certain death, not that we're dramatic or anything).

This is the type of fun you want to avoid, though time does have a tendency to creep some Type 3 fun activities or events into Type 2 and that's okay.

Categorisation

All of this is subjective, what's fun for me may not be fun for you, and that's okay.

Find what makes your soul sing, and go have fun (preferably Type 1 or 2)!

What a year. See below for everything we got up to, shared on YouTube.

Travels

To see each adventure, click on the specific YouTube link. :)

Munros Bagged

We had hoped to bag 30 Munros (more detail here) this year, however, we prioritised other adventures so we haven't climbed as many as we expected!

Maybe we'll manage 30 in 2024...

No, not the party planning game you can find on the app store.

Recently, there has been a lot going on in my current company (and the tech industry in general) between layoffs, re-orgs, incidents and other things that can generally take the wind out of your sails. I know I'm not alone in feeling a bit unmotivated, or that it's at least feeling a little more challenging to get any momentum behind some of the changes you're trying to work on.

Due to a number of reasons, recently I've had a pull request sitting "In Review" and unable to merge for over 3 months. When a change has been sitting for that long, it's hard not to lose context, even with the most meaningful commit messages. Once things started moving again, additional restrictions were put into place to improve our security posture. Not that the processes in place weren't already pretty secure but there is always room for improvement.

Despite many of these events, my team has been a safe place. The culture in the team has always been positive, uplifting, and overall pretty fun. The side benefit is that the work we do is highly regarded across the company, which is something I'm very proud of.

During a recent retrospective, we were discussing the nerves of some of the team when it came to merging changes that have been sitting for a long time when it was suggested we do it as a team.

It was from this suggestion that the "Merge Party" idea came about.

It's not quite mobbing, which I would generally associate with doing the work to prepare for a change to be made. This idea was a little different: bring along any of the pull requests you've raised in recent days that have received the required approvals, and, as a team, we'll work through and merge them as a team.

This has a few benefits:

• One final review before proceeding. This gives other team members who haven't had the chance to review the change an opportunity.
• Moral support, yay! Everyone in the team is there, supporting each other.
• Fast feedback loop. If something doesn't work or breaks in unexpected ways, there are people there with access to rollback, and ultimately minimise impact to customers.
• Establishes a culture of collaboration, and trust. It provides a good opportunity to work together, and during the times when we're waiting for things to build, we can chat and get to know each other better. Background music is optional.

We've had a few merge parties so far, with three or four changes merged each time from different members of the team. Delivering some real value, and the joy experienced at making progress has been palpable from everyone in the team.

One thing it is definitely not: a rigid process. Making them mandatory, or even as a regularly scheduled meeting isn't the intention. The goal is to allow anyone in the team to request a merge party when they feel one is needed, and make it work for the team. Adding more process is against what the goal of this is.

I've enjoyed these enough that I thought it would be good to share. If you decide to give it a go, let me know. I'd love to hear if anyone else has success trying to introduce this kind of thing to their team!

It can be difficult, particularly during recent times of inflation to get by never mind trying to save money. In my opinion, saving is a luxury. I'm in a fortunate position now, but it wasn't too long ago that I was living month to month trying to work my way out of an overdraft.

For the past few years, however, I've begun adopting a few small savings tricks enabled by my bank Monzo and IFTTT which I find enable me to make my money work for me, and allow me to be more intentional with my spending (and saving).

Pots

One of my favourite things about Monzo is the ability to move money between pots easily. Monzo pots allow you to separate money into pots so you know where your money is, and what it's for. They are just living savings accounts but are well integrated into your main account and you can easily see all of your account statuses in one place.

When I get paid I immediately divide my money into pots for bills, groceries, emergency funds, individual savings pots (holiday? garden furniture? whatever I'm saving for at the time), and a dedicated gifts pot. This then leaves "the rest" as my general spending money for that month, and anything that I have left from the previous month then goes into my ISA where I invest it in stocks and shares.

I found that visualising my bills has helped me to cancel subscriptions that I didn't need anymore, focus on paying off loans quicker, and try to make my monthly outgoings as small and intentional as possible.

The savings pots go without saying, but a nice part about them is that you can also set a goal which makes it easy to see at a glance how close you are to your target, which can be motivating in itself. The interest in these pots can also build up nicely too!

The gifts pot is a bit random, but I have a big immediate family that I buy gifts for each year. I've intentionally kept this money separate so that when a birthday or Christmas comes around it doesn't feel like I'm breaking the bank because I've got the money put aside specifically for it.

Budgets

Monzo also gives you the option to set a monthly budget; and within that monthly budget, you can set individual budgets for specific types of spending (travel, eating out (which we break almost every month...), shopping, bills, etc). If you're trying to cut down on eating out, for example, it can help to visualise how much each month you're spending on that and be more intentional about cutting it down.

When you set these it will also give you an overview of how much money you've got left to spend that month, and whether there's a risk you'll overspend. Those little things make it much easier to see how well you're doing, especially if you're trying to save more money.

I will note that if you use credit cards, such as an American Express card, that it does take away some of that visibility of the Monzo categories, as you'll generally pay off the credit card as a whole, rather than individual payments. More recently, you can connect your credit card to Monzo to visualise everything in one app, but I still find the categorisation across cards doesn't feed as well into budgeting as it used to for me.

Automated Savings

This is the part that I enjoy the most because it's possible to configure automated savings in ways that you are comfortable with and if it's not working? Change it.

I've had three automated savings mechanisms set up for the last few years:

• Monzo - Round Ups
• IFTTT - 1p Savings Challenge
• IFTTT - Save as you run

The Monzo round-ups are built into the banking app, and do what they say on the tin. When you spend £1.03, it will automatically round up the rest (to the next pound) into a savings pot of your choosing. In this case, it would put 97p into my dedicated savings pot. These kinds of savings are close enough to what you are spending, that it's possible to miss that you're even spending it and they can add up pretty quickly.

IFTTT

The IFTTT app integrates with the Monzo banking app (and maybe other banks too? I'm not sure, your mileage may vary) and means "If this, then that". So if a specific criteria is met, then it will automatically sort your money for you.

1p Savings Challenge

The 1p savings challenge will increase the amount of money it puts into savings by 1 pence every day, so on the first of January it will put £0.01 into your specified savings pot, and as the year goes on you'll put more into savings, until by the end of the year it's putting over £3 a day into savings before resetting on the 1st of January again.

Save as you Run

It's also possible to connect the IFTT app to your Strava account. If you're interested in running and hiking like I am, you'll probably know that if it's not on Strava then it doesn't count... right?! Well, having this connected means that if I were to run say a 5km run, then IFTT would translate that into £5 into my savings pot. This is quite a fun way to not only improve your fitness but also save money at the same time.

This has been particularly effective for me when I've been trying to save up for something like a new running watch, or maybe a new pair of shoes. I can create a dedicated Monzo Pot with a goal of the cost of the shoes I want to buy, and as I train I can build up my savings specifically for that purchase automatically.

More Saving Tips

I'm in no way affiliated with Monzo or IFTT, but these are a few tips and tricks that I've found myself sharing with others in recent days that I thought were worth sharing in a more permanent place. I will also note that Monzo specifically is only available as a UK bank account right now, and I'm not sure how any of these tricks might apply to other banks.

If you've got other savings tips and tricks, I'd love to hear about them!

All the best,

Donna

Last year, we started started actively trying to earn air miles, or "hack" our travels. I'd heard people talking about it before, but it all sounded too complicated so we put it off for a few months. I regret that now, as we had just moved house and to think of all the points we missed out on by not starting this journey sooner...

TL;DR

• Use a credit card, such as a British Airways American Express Premium Plus card for all your spending (groceries, big purchases, flights).
• Collect air miles (points) and possibly bonus vouchers (Companion vouchers).
• Pay off your credit card monthly, so you don't get charged interest!
• Use sites such as RewardFlightFinder to find flights you can use your points and vouchers on.
• Book flights using your points, vouchers, and outstanding monies.
• Enjoy your trip! ☀️

I started writing this blog as a quick "yay, we got cheap flights" thing and it quickly turned into a 1,000+ word essay, so if you'd like to read more detail on how this all actually works, then read on...

So, how does travel hacking work?

A common misconception is that to earn air miles, you have to take flights.

Travel hacking however, involves building up air miles by spending money using your credit card. There are a number of credit cards which earn you air miles for everything you spend. Depending on the card, the type of air miles you're earning, and where you live (this is a much more common thing in the US than the UK), and other factors, they will determine how you proceed with earning points.

Air miles are like loyalty points, once you save up enough of them you can use them to book or upgrade flights. There's no exact science to what an air mile will get you (it doesn't map to literal miles in the air). Depending on which airline you expect you'll want to fly with, it will influence the credit card you're interested in, as cashing in air miles depends on the "alliance" an airline belongs to.

There are three large alliances, and almost all airlines belong to one:

1. OneWorld (British Airways, Finnair, Qatar Airways, etc.)
2. SkyTeam (Air France, Delta, KLM, etc.)
3. Star Alliance (Air Canada, Luthansa, United, etc.)

Note: Budget airlines such as EasyJet or RyanAir are not part of an alliance, so you cannot redeem points (air miles) against them.

A friend referred us to the British Airways American Express Premium Plus card this time last year; and it's been working out well for our needs.

Why I picked this card:

• 1.5x Avios (oneworld alliance) points for every £1 spent
• 3x Avios points for every British Airways booking
• Companion Voucher: when you spend £10,000 (each year) on the card, you can then use it to cover the value of a second ticket as the same class (i.e. Business) when booking onto a British Airways reward flight.
• Travel Inconvenience Insurance which covers most of the typical things that could go wrong: cancelled flights, delayed luggage, missed connections, etc.

Things you need to be aware of:

• There's a £250 annual fee (which comes out on the card itself).
• It has a 106% APR variable interest rate (for comparison, most people try for interest free credit cards so they don't have to pay them off immediately).
• Given the ridiculous interest rates; you need to be able to pay off any expenses immediately to avoid incurring ridiculous interest charges.

The above details are accurate at the time of writing, but I don't work for British Airways or American Express, so they may be subject to change.

How do you earn points using the card?

When someone refers you (* cough * hint * cough *) for one of these credit cards, you earn bonus points; this changes over time but at the time of posting you'll earn 26,000 extra points for using my referral code  (I get less, but can't blame a girl for trying :D). I can only speak to the benefits of the British Airways American Express Premium Plus card, but there are other good cards on there too.

If you are considering a different card but want to benefit from the referral points, click "View all cards with a Referral Offer" in the top left corner of that page).

I referred Elliot, so we actually have two of these cards that we started roughly 6 months apart which means we can change back and forth between the cards for joint purchases (this is to maximise the gains, and chances for earning two Companion vouchers a year). We've also joint our British Airways accounts as a family so we share the points too.

Use your credit card wherever possible! The difficulty being, this specific card is an Amex card and you do come across many "we don't accept American Express" signs. We do always ask if we're unsure, and try to do our grocery shopping, big purchases, wherever possible we try to make our money work for us.

We then almost immediately pay that off, because, the idea of paying interest on it is pretty scary.

And that's it: spend money on things you'd be buying anyway, but earn additional points for doing so. When you save up enough, you can put them toward reward flights!

So... How did you manage to get the flights for £1 return?

Using the Reward Flight Finder on a miserable Scottish day, I went searching for flights to warm countries, and looked at the few options available from Edinburgh (trying to avoid the need for a transfer in London). There were a limited number of places we could fly to, mostly in the South of England or the Channel Isles... but also Florence, or Majorca.

Elliot's been wanting to go to Tuscany for a long time now, and we thought May would be a good time to visit... so when the flights appeared at roughly 22,000 Avois points for roughly two weeks return, it was hard to resist investigating as that was well within our budget (we had roughly 80,000 points at the time).

But! We also had a Companion Voucher to use, so when we logged in, applied the voucher to those same flights, we couldn't pass them up because it worked out at just £1 each for Business class flights to Florence (roughly a 3 hour flight).

Usually, the taxes, fees and carrier charges mean you're at least paying something for the flights but nope, there was no charge. Now I don't know if that's going to come back to bite us, or there will be some ridiculous charge applied at a later date, but for now... £1 Business class return flights for two weeks in Italy. ☀️

The flights themselves cost:

• £2 total (£1 per person, or 50p each way)
• 42,250 Avios points
• One BA American Express Premium Plus Companion Voucher

All points, and the Companion Voucher were earned through spending on groceries, things for the house, dog food, you name it. So while we did spend money to earn those points... it was money we'd be spending anyway.

I don't know why I didn't try this sooner; and have been evangelising about it ever since (hence the inspiration for this blog). Obviously I know everyone's situation is different, and there are real dangers with credit card debt. But if you're sensible about it, why not try to make your spending work for you?

If you'd like to learn more, or you found this useful then please let me know!

What a year.

I'll keep some of my more personal reflections private (using this article as inspiration for anyone else who is interested: 22 End-of-Year Journaling Prompts), but I do think it's important to take a look back on the year and take in the highs, the lows, and everything in between.

Highlights

Munro Bagging

There are 282 Munros in Scotland (mountains over 900m high), and we're trying to climb (or bag) every one of them. Each year I try to summarise the number we've checked off that year in one of my posts. This year we only bagged four, but it's been a busy year and that's okay. You can read more about Munro Bagging in a separate post.

This total could have been 17 because we attempted two mountains on each adventure this year, however, due to the snow we cut both the first two hikes short for our own safety. For this reason, we've booked on to a winter skills course in 2023 so we know we're ready for this in the future!

The one sad thing about this, however, is that Skye is now too old and fragile to join us in the mountains, meaning we'll have to leave her behind going forward. 😔

Croatia (and Froggyland)

Our trip to Croatia was originally booked for 2021, however, travel restrictions meant we had to reschedule to this year. This meant almost 18 months waiting to go to Froggyland (it was rated one of the top 10 attractions in Split, Croatia in 2020 so it became a thing). This was our first proper holiday abroad together, and you can see more of the photos in my separate post Split, Croatia.

ElectoMagnetic Field (EMF) Camp

This year I got to experience EMF Camp because my friend's talk on Anti-Surveillance Knitting was accepted, and featured on the main stage. It's a camping festival held every two years in the south of England for hackers, geeks, engineers, and scientists. This year we got to try blacksmithing, listen to talks on Computational Alchemy, try deep-fried buckfast, make friends with the people who control the lasers and flame throwers, and much more. The event is non-profit, and run entirely by volunteers.

I'm definitely signing up to go again in 2024.

We started a YouTube Channel

I've always been interested in videography, and I will admit I'm an amateur... but it's fun to capture snippets of our adventures to look back on. This year, we started a YouTube channel to share the videos I've pieced together of our adventures, it has the @donnaandelliot handle, and if you're interested please give it a follow!

We bought a Campervan

This is definitely the most exciting highlight for the year. We had been saving up money for over a year to buy an electric vehicle, however, there had still been no sign of the car being ready any time soon. So back in August, while camping in our tent we started talking about someday getting a campervan to go for adventures, before realising that we had no reasons not to just go for it. A week later, we brought home our van Bilbo and have begun some of our adventures.

It was late in the season when we brought the campervan home, so we're hoping 2023 is the year we really get to make the most of it. You can read more about it in this post.

We ran the Great Scottish Run 10k

In 2018, I ran my first half marathon at the Great Scottish Run, and in 2019 I ran the Great Stirling Marathon (the full thing). A few years back I was obsessed with running, and found it almost a lifeline when things were tough. I fell out of love with running, and for a long time became... lazy. This year, Elliot and I signed up to run our first 10k together, and it's safe to say we didn't achieve any personal bests. However, it was amazing to get back out again, and see some of our friends.

In 2023, I'd like to find my love of running again and achieve a sub 2-hour half marathon pace at the Great Scottish Run Half Marathon.

Chicago

In November, we flew to the windy city for a week long break. We've been playing the Avois points game this year, and were able to book our first ever personal Business class flights for only a fraction more than the regular flights would have cost us. It was an amazing experience, and definitely had me feeling very priviledged... but we worked hard to be where we are, so this was definitely a win on it's own.

The trip itself was amazing, we got to meet so many friends and colleagues on our travels (many of whom it was the first time meeting in person), not to mention exploring a beautiful city as we experienced it turning from 23 degrees celcius down to minus two and snowing.

We even got to see Jill Biden as we checked out from our hotel (not that we recognised her at the time... but sssh).

We posted a video recap of the adventure here.

I paid off my student loan

This is a huge thing for me, I never thought I'd be in a position where I could pay off my student loan and in a way I almost feel embarrassed talking about it because I know the way the economy is right now. But, I've worked hard and set it as one of my goals for 2022 to pay off my student loan, and finally on my last working day of the year I succeeded. Going into the new year without this hanging over my head is a huge relief, and I hope to make the most of it going forward.

Career

I've had a big year in terms of my career too, but I've already spoken about most of these things in separate blog posts:

• I went to KubeCon in Valencia with work.
• I became a Certified Kubernetes Application Developer.
• I got promoted to Staff Software Engineer.

My favourite photos

On my first pass through my camera roll for the past year I managed to narrow down my top 67 photos before finally settling on the top 9 photos that have sparked joy this year.

1. Bagging our first winter munro.
2. Adventures in Croatia.
3. KubeCon in Valencia with my very best friend.
4. ElectroMagnetic Field Festival.
5. My family looking over a hill at the most southern point in Scotland.
6. Chippy by the sea on the day we bought our van, Bilbo.
7. Family photoshoot at Kilchurn castle.
8. The bridges lifting over our Architecture boat tour in Chicago.
9. 3am photos of the van parked up at Spelga Dam, Northern Ireland.

A Moment for Remembrance

This year has been a bit of a rollercoaster, while I've had some beautiful moments I would be remiss if I didn't take the time to reflect on those I've lost.

My Great Uncle Bobbie out in Australia passed away during the Summer, the last time I saw him in person was in 2017 when he surprised us all with a visit and he crashed my graduation. He was the most eccentric man I've ever known, and the world is a duller place without the random 2 am calls to see how "his little darling" is. Rest in Peace, Uncle Bobbie.

Then in November, just shy of her 79th birthday I also lost my Granny Lilian. She'd been diagnosed with Alzheimer's many years ago, and it's been tough to see her mental and physical health deteriorate over time. She'd always wanted a big family, and being one of 24 grandchildren, she certainly achieved that. We were in Chicago when we heard the news of her passing, and made it back to Northern Ireland within 26 hours, passing through 4 countries to make it in time to say goodbye. Rest in Peace, Granny.

2023: What Next?

I have a few generic goals for the next year: I want to run more (get healthy), read more books, and I want to cut down on the amount of doomscrolling.

Not only that, I want to appreciate the little moments more. Life is short, and Skye is getting older, and I want to be sure to savour the time we have left. I don't want to hold back because I'm worried about what others will think of me; I want to shamelessly be my unfiltered self, and do the things that make me happy.

I want to double the number of Munro's we've bagged, take the van for as many adventures as we can manage,  travel the world, continue improving the house, and just... live. As cliché as all that sounds, but I don't care.

Lang may yer lum reek. (Scots for: Long may you live).

If you haven't already, I highly recommend purchasing (or at least borrowing) the book Who Moved My Cheese? - Link to the book on Amazon below, but I do recommend taking a look for it in your local library, or a local bookstore.

If you live nearby to me, I'd also happily let you borrow my copy.

Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life: Amazon.co.uk: Johnson, Dr Spencer: 8601404197116: Books

Buy Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life 01 by Johnson, Dr Spencer (ISBN: 8601404197116) from Amazon’s Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

Spencer Johnson

So... why this book specifically?

For one: It takes maybe an hour to read, so it doesn't require anywhere near as much time commitment or concentration as many other books.

For another: the concept is so simple but framed so beautifully that it just makes sense, and if you don't take anything from it then maybe you're a Hem. And you'll only get that reference if you read the book, so now you just have to read it.

The book focuses on how four little characters (Sniff, Scurry, Hem, and Haw) react to change: their cheese is gone, and how they handle it. Obviously, Cheese is meant to be interchangeable with whatever is relevant for your life at the time of reading, which is why it's so great: each time you read it, it's likely you're going to take something else away from it.

I first read this book at the very start of 2020 (before, you know, the pandemic), my therapist at the time let me borrow it and it opened my eyes to so much in my personal life that I didn't want to admit. I was being a Hem and (spoiler alert) refusing to acknowledge that something was happening in my life that needed to change, and got stuck in a position I was comfortable with, even if that wasn't what was best for me. I can now look back on this time objectively, and see all the things that I missed at the time.

I had taken a mental health day from work after my therapist handed me this book, took a walk to a lovely little café and read this book over a cup of chamomile tea. I cried, and I cried. Thankfully nobody around knew me, but there was something that changed for me at that moment: I knew that I needed to become more like Haw and (more spoilers) take the first steps to understand what that new Cheese looked like for me, and decided I would be more intentional in assessing how things are going forward so that I can be better prepared for changes in the future.

Just a few days ago, as we were shopping for Christmas gifts I came across this book again and it all came back to me. I knew I had to buy this book and read it again, and make sure others knew about it. I read it again while relaxing on my first day off for the holiday break, and feel inspired again.

This time, however, I was looking at it from a career perspective. My company has been dealing with the aftermath of layoffs and reorgs, and knowing there are more changes coming in the new year has led to some uncertainty. Reading this book has me feeling more motivated, and wanting to embrace the situation for what it is and not fight the change.

The summary that you can take away from this book is: Change is inevitable. Effective people monitor change, anticipate it, adapt to it, learn to embrace and enjoy it. If you do not change you can become extinct. If you do change you won’t just suffer less stress and unhappiness, you’ll enjoy more success and fulfilment in every part of your life and your work.

Some of the questions it has you asking yourself are:

• What would you do if you weren't afraid?
• What would your life look like if these changes led to something better?
• Where will you find the best opportunities, by embracing or fighting change?

Personally, going into the new year I'm going to try and embrace changes, and try to not let my fear of failure hold me back from expanding my comfort zone.

So... What would you do if you weren't afraid?

I'm going to caveat this blog post with the fact that I'm not actually the best at looking after myself but I'm actively trying to do better. I also intended for this blog to be about not feeling guilty when you take time off sick, but I guess it turned into something a bit more than that. I'm currently writing this on my iPad (my laptop is away getting repaired) while I'm laid up in bed with a mug of tea and some soothers, with my golden retriever curled at my side.

The past two years have been tough, to say the least, on top of a global pandemic I've had a lot to deal with in my personal life. I lost my granny to cancer in May 2020, ended a nine-year relationship after dealing with all the things that led to that decision, sold my old house and bought a new one, filed for divorce and countless other things in between.

To say it's been tough I guess is an understatement, and I still have moments where everything feels a little overwhelming. Yet, I've always put pressure on myself to just get over it. To pretend that nothing is wrong, and continue being as productive as I've always been. I've always been pretty good at covering up what I'm struggling with, with only a select few knowing what's really going on.

I remember laughing when someone said they were jealous of me having my life together and all I could think was "how many people are there like me, pretending to have their sh!t together?". I've always been a fan of the following quote because social media encourages us to only show the good things in our lives. It's worth noting here that I've definitely considered deleting or cutting out most of this post so many times, so if you're reading this I found the courage to post it, yay!

When everyone was sent home in March 2020 it made it easier to hide how much I was struggling. You can't truly know what's going on in someone's life through Zoom (unless they choose to tell you), plus they even have filters which take out any puffy eyes or red faces (speaking from experience). I know I'm not alone in this as well so I'm not going to pretend that my struggles are unique, but typing them out here does help. If it helps even one other person, that's just a bonus.

Even with all of the difficulties I was facing, I continued to work to such an extent that I was raised for and successfully achieved an accelerated promotion in my previous role. I was responsible for the release management of the largest CloudFoundry estate in the world, on top of having the highest response rate for client tickets in my team. Clinging to my work and doing it well was like a lifeline I held onto throughout the start of the lockdown, and I was working remotely anyway so what else was I going to do with my time?

Despite all the great feedback that I received from my peers and management, and the evidence to suggest that I was succeeding I would still stress if I made one tiny mistake. A 99% success rate wasn't good enough for me (here's looking at you, that one DNS typo with a 9 instead of a 6). I always put myself under extra pressure, and I'm hoping that by acknowledging my struggles that maybe someone else out there who might be struggling will know that they are not alone.

I will always encourage others to rest when they're not feeling well or burnt out. I know that if someone isn't feeling great that you won't get the best out of them and that it's better to let them rest and recover, but I can never share that same kindness with myself. I always feel it's a sign of my own weakness, and feel a ridiculous sense of guilt for taking time to look after myself.

Isn't it wonderful how brains work like that?

Listen to others

One of my favourite things about working at CircleCI is the culture and sense of community, we have an #emoji channel and a really excellent set of slack emojis. My favourite emoji has to be a bowl of soup with the alias :feel-better-soon-because-we-like-you-and-take-the-time-you-need-to-be-whole-before-returning-to-work: which is a bit of a mouthful, but it really made me feel so welcome when I first spotted someone taking time to look after themselves and the rest of the team responding with this emoji.

Even going back to work, my team have been checking in to make sure I'm really recovered and not just pretending to be better because I was bored being off sick (I'm insufferable when I'm lying around the house for too long, sorry Elliot). If I really just listened to my colleagues and friends instead of the voice in my head, I would feel a lot more comfortable with taking time off sick to get better. So I guess where I'm going with this is: listen to the people around you, they really do care.

There's no need to apologise

In recent years, the focus on mental health and looking after yourself has become more prevalent. Despite this, I still find myself apologising for taking time to look after myself or getting emotional. When I first wrote this, it was when I had taken a couple of weeks off being physically ill from Covid, but I know that taking time for your mental health is just as important.

This image covers many things that I find myself apologising for, but have been actively trying to stop myself from doing. It's important to look after yourself, and doing what you need to do unapologetically goes along way to getting there.

Well, that was over a thousand words of rambling... Cheers to anyone who read this far, and if you've taken anything away from it then I'm delighted!

Look after yourselves.

Growing up in a small, rural town in Northern Ireland meant I definitely did not expect to become a software engineer specialising in networking and infrastructure, yet here I am and I'm absolutely loving it. It usually shocks people to find that I accidentally stumbled into this career, and with that I realised I've never taken the time to write out how that happened. So... here it is (so far). 😅

When I was a teenager, before Facebook and Twitter really took off it was all about Bebo (Wikipedia covers the history of the rise and fall of the social media platform here). My first foray into web development involved designing "skins" for my Bebo homepage, all ridiculously cringe so I am delighted it's no longer available.

At this time, I definitely wasn't thinking that I wanted to start a career in technology. All I knew is that I wanted to make pretty templates for my profile and it had been fun while it lasted.

When I finished high school, I studied Business Information Technology at Queen's University Belfast. During this time most of my modules focused on accounting, marketing, operations and all those good business-related topics. There had been a handful of modules during this course that allowed me to dip my toes into technology, though I definitely didn't see myself considering it as a career at this time.

I actually think that one module on the "Fundamentals of Programming" was my lowest grade; so to say I had low expectations of myself at the time is an understatement.

One of the things that attracted me to this degree was that in order to graduate, I needed to complete a year in the industry and gain some real-life experience. I thought this sounded great, as it meant I would improve my prospects when I graduated and started looking for full-time jobs. Win-win, right?

Well, that was until I was rejected from at least 15 different internship roles that I had applied for (seriously). Most of the roles were in operations, I think I even ended up applying for a role in a Bitcoin start-up (before I knew anything about it, so I don't really know what I was expecting).

So, by the point where I interviewed with JP Morgan Chase in Glasgow, I had been relatively desperate to get any job. Sometimes when I mention this to people, they're surprised... which is why I think it's important to include it, as it's a big part of my story. During a half-day onsite interview, one of the questions I was asked is, "do you think you would prefer a role as a business analyst, systems administrator, or application developer?" my response was "wherever you think I would be best placed."

It's safe to say at that point I just wanted any job, but I didn't actually expect to be hired as an application developer. On the first day of my internship back in 2015, my manager said to me that I was going to be developing a Java Web Application using Spring MVC. I remember feeling so overwhelmed, and out of my depth that I didn't think I would last longer than a week. Pretty sure the phrase "oh sh!t, what have I done?!" was uttered more than a few times.

After about four months, the intern project I had been working on was deployed to production, ready to be used by internal users. I would probably cringe looking back on it now, but I did it! Plus, realistically who wouldn't cringe when they look back at their earlier work?

At that point, with feedback from my peers and managers, I started to think that maybe I could get the hang of this after all. I enjoyed playing with CSS (lol, I know, I struggle with this now) and thought I would become a Frontend Developer.

My industrial placement year passed, and as the intern representative for my location, I worked alongside my colleagues in Bournemouth and London to organise the first EMEA offsite for JPMC long-term interns. It was a great event and gave me the opportunity to exercise some of my event management and networking skills to kickstart my career (see photo above).

I was offered a full-time graduate role to return to JP Morgan once I finished my degree. During this time my manager moved to their internal cloud space and asked if I would like to join the new team.

This was a no-brainer for me, as I knew some of the team already and accidentally falling into tech in the first place worked out well so far... so why not try again?

While in that team, I joined a support rota for the first time, and on my first shift one of the data centres I was supporting literally went on fire (I might do a separate blog about some of my on-call experiences sometimes).

At some point on this team, however, I felt like I was being painted into a box as someone who only wanted to work on Front-end changes. My interest however was in User Experience (UX), not necessarily only for frontend users but at all levels of the stack. At this point, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I did know I didn't want to limit myself to one specific area.

After about a year with this team, an opportunity opened up to join a new platform team focused on automating deployments of CloudFoundry to AWS, the people in this team were awesome and despite being out of my comfort zone again (I knew nothing about platform engineering), I took the risk and turns out I really enjoy working with infrastructure!

This team was tasked with deploying the JPMC Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which would allow internal teams to securely deploy their applications that supported the bank for all lines of business. We started with deploying CloudFoundry on AWS, and after about six months this focus changed to deploying CloudFoundry on VMWare (NSX-T and vSphere) instead; this added a whole new layer of learning as the project progressed. We successfully automated the deployments of what became the largest CloudFoundry installation in the world, which I think is pretty cool.

There was even one day when we managed to deploy eight platforms at the same time, with only one minor hiccup (who knew getting a 9 and a 6 mixed up when defining CIDR blocks made such a big difference...). In addition to contributing to the automation and configuration of these platforms, I also worked closely with teams specialising in each of the services offered on these platforms (such as RabbitMQ, MySQL, etc), managing the releases of the new platforms and supporting the developer relations efforts with users of the platform.

By the time I had built up five years of experience, I thought it was time to evaluate the direction my career was going. I had spent my entire career until that date with the same company, and I felt it was time that I stepped out of my comfort zone, and tried working for a different kind of company.

I wrote a separate post on "Finding a New Job in Tech" which goes into more detail on the criteria I consider when assessing if I need to find a new role. It was a tough decision for me, but one I feel was worth taking.

I joined CircleCI's developer tooling team, taking the opportunity to go fully remote and take a leap out of my comfort zone. However, it didn't feel like too much of a leap as I genuinely enjoyed each of the interviews with the team that I would get to work with. This was such a contrast to some of the places I interviewed that I was excited to get the opportunity to work with these people, and I have not been disappointed.

After about 6 weeks in this role, I was presented with the details for a new team: API Joy. Honestly, I loved the name but it was a little vague. It was an initiative to standardise all of CircleCI's APIs by deploying an ingress controller and API Gateway; improving the internal developers' experience of creating new features for customers. Despite having no experience with Kubernetes, knowing what an ingress controller was, or the monumental learning curve I was super excited to join this team.

Over a year later, the team has grown and we've achieved so much. Our team is known for the deliberate approaches we take to implementing changes, over-communicating everything we do, detailed decision records, and party corgis.

Recently, I've been promoted to Staff software engineer and I feel privileged to have the opportunity to grow in this role with such a supportive and hard-working team beside me.

So... back to the question of how did I get here?

I'll not do myself the disservice of saying it was luck, but I took the opportunities that were presented to me, and gave it my all... so far it's worked out!

This is my longest blog yet, it's been rewritten maybe ten times over the past few months. If you've taken the time to read this: thank you! I've decided that it's probably good enough, and I don't actively market these anyway so if you've stumbled across this, please do say hi! :)

I was chatting with a friend recently about my promotion to Staff Software Engineer, and as part of the chat, I mentioned how I often struggle with Imposter Syndrome. They seemed genuinely shocked that I struggle with this, and it reminded me that unless people talk openly about these things, it's hard to know what anyone else is really experiencing.

If you've never heard of imposter syndrome before:

Imposter Syndrome can be defined as a "persistent doubt concerning one's abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one's ongoing success." [source]

I worked for a large corporate company for five years before stepping out of my comfort zone to join a new company. When you've worked for a company for so long, you learn the status quo and can establish a level of comfort that makes the feelings of being a fraud grow that little bit smaller, regardless of what you're actually working on.

I'm not saying that experiencing imposter syndrome is limited to joining a new company, you could be joining a new team, maybe earning a promotion or generally feel like everyone else knows what they're doing and worry you are going to be exposed at any moment for not having it together.

So I guess I'm writing this to say... if you have ever felt like this then you are not alone. The below image captures it perfectly:

When I accepted the offer to join my current company I was delighted... for a moment. Then I started doubting myself. What if I'm not the right person for this job? What if nobody likes me? What if I don't pick up these new programming languages fast enough? Have I just tricked them into hiring me? In my gut, I knew that wasn't the case but there was a shadow hanging over me for the longest time that would make me second guess myself.

For the first few months in this job, I would have regular chats with my manager about how I felt like I wasn't doing enough, and every time she would remind me that I was doing all the right things and that I didn't need to worry. That didn't really stop me from worrying though, because all I could think about was "maybe she's just saying this to keep me happy, she doesn't really mean it..."

Growing up, I was always put under pressure to do my best. If I wasn't coming first in my class at school, then I would cry in the car on the way home worried that I was a failure. This was fuelled by a few family members who would always ask, "well, why didn't you come first?" and that mentality has unfortunately stuck with me. I still experience these feelings now that I'm older. If I'm working on something and there is an issue, or I haven't achieved perfection then I worry I'm not good enough. It is in these moments that my imposter syndrome flares up at its worst, it feels like people are finally seeing the real me: someone who doesn't know what they're actually doing.

The reality is, you only see the version of a person that they are willing to show you. What someone posts online is just a snippet of what they're feeling and more often than not, they do only share the positives.

Take my promotion for example... all that people see is that I was promoted, and the celebrations around it. They don't see the stress and tears that were involved in the work that led to that promotion, and honestly, most of my team probably didn't see much of that either. It's easy to fall into the trap of feeling that you have to hide how you're really feeling for fear of judgement, but I've found that when I have opened up about my struggles, people have been nothing but kind.

I suspect anyone still reading at this point may be nodding along thinking one of two things, "yes, of course, people will support you when you open up about your struggles", or some of you may fall into the other mentality of, "well, they might support you, but if I were to open up about my feelings they would say something different". If you fall into that second group I'd like you to reconsider: you deserve to be supported, and the way you are feeling about yourself is not a reflection of what others feel about you.

I don't know about you, but I'm definitely my own worst critic.

I'm not saying I have any solid ideas for making this better, but sometimes I find that even knowing that others face their own struggles makes me feel a little less alone. And sometimes that's enough.

Sharing this post has been somewhat therapeutic, and if even one person who stumbles across this post takes something away from this, I hope they take away this: You are worthy. Failures happen; they don't define you.

Be Kind. ✌️

I remember my first day as a technology intern and hearing people talk about version control, Git, SVN, and wondering what they were talking about. I had no idea what a repository was, or why would I care about being able to access someone else's code. It was all brand new to me, falling into it from a degree in Business and accidentally landing a role in tech.

I was determined to learn, and basically "fake it till I made it", so I went home and tried researching all things about Git. Starting with TortoiseGit I managed to learn the basics over time, and as long as I could clone, pull, add, commit and push then I was all good.

For the next few years, I then thought I was getting the hang of things, I was able to easily clone repositories, make my changes to a branch, commit them and push. I even moved to use the command line (this was big for me at the time). What more do you need?

If I had an issue, I was making small enough changes that I was just creating a new branch from main and starting again. I hadn't taken the time to learn a better way, because this was just the way I was taught.

Over the past couple of years, I've been learning a lot more about Git best practices and realising just how little I actually knew about using Git so I thought it was worth documenting some of the commands I've been getting used to and how it's increased my confidence. Even then, I know I'm only scraping the surface.

Patching

When you're adding a change to be committed, it's easy to get into the habit of running git add -A to just add all the things. However, doing so means it's so easy to accidentally commit something that you didn't mean to.

For the longest time now however, I've been relying on patching. It's almost the same command, only you can be more intentional with the changes you're going to commit:

git add -p

By using this command, you can iteratively select the changes you want to make. This has saved me from accidentally commiting incorrect blank spaces, YAML travesties, or by realising "oh wait, I only did that for a test, I don't really want that change". It allows you to stage or unstage each "hunk" by iteratively going through all the changes, showing you the diff, and prompting you for a response of y for yes, n for no, and a variety of other options that I haven't really looked into honestly.

This also works if you want to iteratively undo changes, by running:

git checkout -p

I sometimes find myself doing this when my editor wants to automatically change double quotes to single for example, and I don't want that to be included in a functional change.

Note: patch doesn't work for brand new files, you do still need to run a git add <file-name> to add them.

I'll then always do git status to check that I haven't missed anything before proceeding.

Commit Messages

I know that I'm not the only one who is guilty of getting lazier with my commit messages over time when I'm debugging something. Particularly when I need CI to run my tests, or I'm trying to configure new workflows. It's really easy to build up many commits with less than meaningful commits: test, testing, work please, fixing a bug, typo, ohno, Y U NO WORK, oh my bad.

It happens, but when you're raising a pull request, you might want to consider tidying up all those commits and I've only recently found that there's a simple way to do this. 🤯

Commit messages should be meaningful: think of the future you, trying to investigate why something isn't working as expected, and all you've got to work with when looking back at the history is "test fix for bug", it's going to add a lot of time to your debugging. It's possible to apply rules to your repository that enable Jira formatting or other requirements, but often I still find these are not enough.

Commit messages that provide context can be time-consuming, but taking the time to do it right can make things much easier long term. For example:

ci: Add separate workflow for integration tests

I added <functionality> because <why is this important>.

This was done instead of <other options> for <reasons>.

The first line acts as the "header" and should provide a summary of your change. I often prepend my commits with the type of change it is, i.e. ci, dev, tests, prod to give an indicator of what type of functional change it is. I usually then try to explain the functionality I've added, and the context for why this change is important. If there were alternative approaches I disregarded, I usually include them too. I can't even begin to explain the number of times I have seen commits from past team members that have saved hours in duplicate effort because all the context is there in the commit message.

I've had the pleasure to work with Dan, who has been commended many times for his commit practices; and someone else has already written a post about their favourite commit message (which is one of Dan's) which summarises all of this much better than I could.

Rebasing isn't actually so bad

I would love to go back to some of the projects I've worked on over the years and cringe at the commit history, to see the spaghetti that it turned out to be (hence the cover photo). I expect it would be a thing of art and chaos, in that I expect there to be many, many woven commits and no clear way to distinguish what's going on.

But the thing is, I was always scared to rebase because I expected I would break everything. So it was much "easier" to just merge, deal with the conflicts, recommit and move on. I've since been getting over my fear of rebasing and you know what, it's not actually that bad. There are just a handful of commands to run.

If you're working on a feature branch and your colleague has merged their latest changes in the main branch (or another branch you need changes from), first of all, you'll need to fetch the latest changes from the repo. In general, this is a good practice even if you're not aware of any new changes in the repo:

git fetch -a

Once you've fetched the latest changes, it is as simple as:

git rebase -i origin/main

This command will let you interactively rebase your changes on top of the main branch, showing all of the options you can use for each change. The commands I regularly use include: pick, reword, squash and fixup. An example of what this looks like is below. Simply edit this file by doing EXIT + i and changing the word at the start of the line to your chosen command.

pick ae7256c This is an example commit

# Rebase 7677657..ae7256c onto 7677657 (2 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick <commit> = use commit
# r, reword <commit> = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit <commit> = use commit, but stop for amending
# s, squash <commit> = use commit, but meld into previous commit
# f, fixup <commit> = like "squash", but discard this commit's log message
# x, exec <command> = run command (the rest of the line) using shell
# b, break = stop here (continue rebase later with 'git rebase --continue')
# d, drop <commit> = remove commit
# l, label <label> = label current HEAD with a name
# t, reset <label> = reset HEAD to a label
# m, merge [-C <commit> | -c <commit>] <label> [# <oneline>]
# .       create a merge commit using the original merge commit's
# .       message (or the oneline, if no original merge commit was
# .       specified). Use -c <commit> to reword the commit message.
#
# These lines can be re-ordered; they are executed from top to bottom.

This command will append your changes to the top of the main branch as if you had created your branch directly from the latest changes on main. It will look as if it hasn't diverged, which means you've reduced the amount of branches running in parallel in the commit history. This is a much cleaner approach than merging.

Once you've rebased, you're likely going to want to do a git status to find that there is a complaint that your branch and the origin branch has diverged, and that's okay. Because right now, the origin branch has no idea you've rebased. Instead of doing a git pull like it suggests, you're going to want to force push:

git push origin <branch-name> --force-with-lease

I generally use the --force-with-lease tag as it is a much safer option than just --force because it will not override any work on the remote branch if more commits were added to that branch from your teammates.

Fixup

I like to keep commits related to specific changes, so that if necessary I can revert just one change and keep the rest, i.e. if I'm modifying CI config and a helm chart, and the two changes are related but different I would sometimes break these out into separate commit messages, that also make it clear where I'm making my changes, for example:

• ci: Add new job for test-against-production
• values: set minReplicas to 10

However, most of what I've been doing lately involves YAML. So it's not unusual to find myself needing to modify (or fixup) one of those changes to fix a space. That kind of fix should live within the first commit, so my current process involves:

1. Adding the change using git patch by using git add -p
2. Running git log to grab the commit SHA for the commit I want to fix.
3. Then fixing the commit, using: git commit --fixup <commit-SHA>
4. To retain a clean history, you then need to rebase, so I would do a rebase with autosquash, like: git rebase -i origin/main --autosquash (autosquash will do the heavy lifting for your fixup).
5. You can confirm everything looks as expected with git log again. You should see that the fixup commit is gone, but your change has been added to the commit you just "fixed up".
6. Then, if you had already pushed remotely, you will need to force push, by running the following: git push origin <branch-name> --force-with-lease

Following these practices, and getting more familiar with them can make your development experience better long term.

These are only a handful of practices that I now use, and I haven't even scratched the surface on many of magical things you can actually do with Git.

Oh Sh!# Git

I've recently learned about https://ohshitgit.com/ which has been added to my bookmarks, and definitely going to be kept handy for any future times when I've messed up. Because sometimes these things are tough.

There is also a PC version if you're not a fan of swearing: https://dangitgit.com/en

Explaining Git with Cats

I stumbled across these images a while back, and as a visual learner I appreciated the illustrations from Tomomi Imura on girliemac.com:

Think of anything else that is part of your development process?

Let me know, I'd love to learn!

Donna