Issue # 1
State Of Play
Complexity renders you ______!
Complexity is incapacitating. Don't know where to start and what to work on. Everything you try to do needs some troubleshooting as it just doesn't work as the README cleanly spells it out. There's always this “little” issue that you along with ninety percent of the users run into.
Some call this an edge case.
Infrastructure is in a constant state of flux as the tools used to orchestrate and manage said infrastructure are always being replaced by other more efficient tools that someone ran across and heard good things about. Replaced isn’t really the correct word here as the migration project is started with no end date. While you started off learning/dealing with a few tools to get your job done, now requires learning how to use “new” ones while remembering how to use the “old” tools.
Some call this moving fast and breaking things.
Coworker does a tech talk on a subject after doing some research out of sheer curiosity, becomes the lead person on a highly involved and complex project.
Some call this opportunity.
Paid online course confuses you more than the original befuddlement caused by the documentation. A lot of prescriptions yet no real explanations. Do this then do that. Why? Cause that's how it'll work.
Some call this online learning.
Roles are fluid. One day you're building skills in one area and feel like you're making progress, and the next day you have to shift focus and learn something completely different.
Some call this flexibility.
What do you call IT?
Disenchantment
On the subject of rants, I highly recommend taking the time and reading this. I might be doing it a disservice labeling it a rant as I think it’s more profound than that. Agree or disagree, still worth a read and having a discussion, if not with others, at least with yourself about where you stand.
I don’t believe in sprints
Ranting continues, however on this one, I beg to differ a bit as I don’t think things are that clear cut. There’s a lot of grey in that space and would like to think that some structure is necessary, if for nothing else, to at least contain/frame the content.
What do you think?
Tooling
A picture is worth a thousand words. I have always been a fan of tools that visualize a complex structure. Maybe I lean towards those tools cause I feel that I’m more of a visual learner, but whatever the case may be, JSON Crack, can be used to visualize your JSON data and most importantly explore the connections between that data.
Speaking of visualization, here’s a curated collection of diagramming tools that might come in handy. I personally find those lists useful when I’m looking for something specific, however I don’t really know what to do with them when I come across one and I don’t have a specific need. Do you bookmark it in the hope that you’ll find that bookmark, the next time you’re looking for a tool, or do you star the repository thinking that when the time comes, you will go through all your starred repos and to find that one? I’ve done both and neither one has worked so far.
Last but not least, and this might be a few months old, however my Github access token recently expired and I noticed that they introduced fine grained personal access tokens. Always disliked lacking that granularity for those tokens, so it was nice to see that issue addressed.