Welcome Maple. I don’t know what type of cat or kitten she is. But she’s 2 years old, and gorgeous. She’s Panko’s big sister.
She’s a tiny kitty, so here’s hoping that she and Panko get along, and he’s gentle 🙂
I’m sure she’ll very quickly establish that she’s in charge, though.
So, it’s no secret that I’m very much into PC gaming; and with it, the hobby of essentially running LAN parties or gaming communities.
Recently, with the growth of the pandemic, I’d been able to grow my own little community to about 120-odd people on Discord. There’s a core group of about 15-16 of us that play games together, and the rest sort of float in and out of discussions and various gaming releases.
September’s been a pretty crazy period; and I’ve started taking stock of the hobby I call “Only Snacks” and gaming. Not only is it a gaming community of close friends and family, it also ties into an enterprise level server rack, and internet connection. Granted I get benefits out of it in terms of business and capabilities; but it opens doors for our small group that didn’t exist before.
It’s pretty expensive. I don’t mind, there are others out there with wackier and (far) more expensive passions. I’m still within my means, but I did note today that it eats up almost all my time and energy.
The group is something I consider close friends – and among them a circle that I’d consider family. They honestly saw me through a rough time (that I think everyone went through) yet here we are, still together and thick as thieves.
So what’s going on? Nothing really, I’m actually just putting down some musings into the blog to keep things going.
Tim‘s birthday is on the 13th; however, we were all mostly free this Thursday evening to join him for a nice meal at Outback Steakhouse (North Strathfield) – we were there for company over the food, but it was hearty food, full of grease, and plenty of banter to be had!
Outback Steakhouse has been in my life for quite a while, actually. Despite it’s reputation, it served more as a common meeting point for various crowds of people that walked in and out of my life. When I got my first real job in the Tech Industry (working in marketing!) I planned many a LAN party event here with one of my best mates, Ben (missingo) at this restaurant over many many nights.
Anyway, retrospectives aside; the food hasn’t changed much at all (the prices have though, oof!)
They left too much of the fat cap at the end on, one end of the steak was charred way more than the other end (the fatty end was undercooked) – making the fat render and drench everything in grease, but not in a nice hot way. The steak was left to rest too long so it was almost cold; and the chips had coagulated with their cheese to form a solid brick (you can see in the photo, this is about 60 seconds after the plate was put down in front of me).
Still, I had a really enjoyable night (definitely more the company than the food, as it always has been) and everyone else that attended had a blast too!
It was good to see Marshy, Brad, Brad, Tanj, Amy, Sean, Jimmy, Bec, Mat, Gaetano, and the birthday boy, Tim. Happy Birthday mate.
I work on a lot of different coding projects from a personal perspective. Usually depending on mood, or other factors, I will jump from project to project, working on them whenever time permits. My most recent role in my career left me a little bit short of coding and development time; focusing instead more on project delivery, and team management to get a big product across the line at a FinTech startup.
So, to get my coding juices flowing once more, I thought I’d whip up some self-hosted work:
- Deploy and install GitLab to manage my code
- Build a site to track my activity to get back in the swing of things
Cue, https://jtiong.dev
What’s the purpose of this?
It is a simple quick overview of my activity on the code repositories that I’d ported over to my localized GitLab installation. It will let me see what I’ve been working on recently, and keep me motivated, on continuing to polish my skillsets.
What this project demonstrates
Well, this demonstrates several things I thought might be handy going forward:
- Deploying an NGINX Proxy (on an external machine), via Docker Compose to manage the incoming connections to jtiong.dev and other various websites
- Deploying GitLab Community Edition onto a different physical server for my personal use and code management
- Creating a Docker Compose deployment based off the
php7.4-apacheimage for the site - Using my own framework Spark – to create this site
- Using a self written URL Router
- Using PSR-4 to autoload classes
- Interacting with the GitLab REST API
- Using Bootstrap 4.x for a very simple frontend
Source code to the site can be provided as needed to, although I really need to clean it up.
It’s been good getting back in the saddle for some basic web development again! 🙂
So, I’ve got a “main” website – https://jtiong.com (which is currently Error 500’ing)
Which runs on a fairly old version of Laravel. Since it’s inception; the site was used mainly as a central one-stop shop for everything about my presence on the internet. Oh how times have changed.
Nowadays, it makes more sense with a number of domains I own, to split up the content and footprint of my stuff on the internet from a singular jtiong.com website, into a number of different sites based upon what people trying to find me for, or to categorise the activities I do.
Domains I have include:
- jtiong.blog (this site) – my personal blog, which is strictly just personal, non-professional stuff
- jtiong.dev – where I hope to eventually host some sort of software development info about myself
- jtiong.network – currently a serverless site experiment, however I hope to change this
- jtiong.com – a central landing page from which people click through to the other domains
So what does this mean?
Two new projects! The .com and .dev domains which will be important as part of my “online resume” so, I really should get them done sooner rather than later…!
However, this also means I need to really look into how I implement these!
Laravel will be driving:
- jtiong.com – a landing page/gateway system
- jtiong.network – services and resources for friends & family
I’m looking at using the Socialite package for Laravel to integrate login via Discord, this’ll mean that certain links and features will only be visible based off friends & family that have certain roles in my Discord server; or at least, that’s been the original intent.
My Own Framework (which I call Spark) – will be driving:
- jtiong.dev – dev blogs, resources
This dev site will be more of a technical dump to keep me consistently working on my coding skills. The setup of this site is a traditional website that’ll ride on the tails of my intended GitLab installation. The fallback of course, is to just use the GitHub API, but I’ll only start looking at that later.
The site should just start listing out my commits and on what projects they’re made on to try and keep things accountable and interesting. It’s just a cool little showcase project.
More features might be added later relevant to doing development work in the future!
My sister and her partner have been on a weekend getaway and I’ve been at home working and looking after Panko.
During such a time I’ve been pretty busy and Panko has been stuck amusing himself and moping outside my home office.
The guilt has finally hit me and I’m going to clean up my office so that Panko can hang out with me and chill in my home office. This means I’ll need to clean up all the computer bits, cable manage everything and make sure the room is doggo safe for him to chill in with me. I won’t proof it tot the point that he has free entry but if I’m in the office (I usually am) he can come in and chill too so he doesn’t let his anxiety get the better of him.
The things I do for this dog.
I’m moving all the blog posts I can from my old custom written blog, to this site. So weird posts might start appearing going backwards in time haha 😛
It’ll be nice to have everything in the one site, though.
Update: After 5 hours, it’s finally all done D:
Mum passed away at 1:17am this morning.
I think, it’s quite safe to say that 2020, has been an insane year.
I didn’t do my usual post at the end of 2019; and I didn’t do much for the start of this year either with my blog. There’s a lot of reasons for it; but on both a personal level, and indeed a global level – I think 2020 is a year that my generation will remember for quite a while.
It’s a year in which, the global markets stopped, then through sheer force of will, continued on. The age of the internet and remote services & tools were forced into a level of maturity that up until now, were only something the novel few could dip their toes such waters. Indeed, my own blog post (this post you’re reading now) is all about figuring out being able to work from anywhere, at any time.
2020 brought with it, COVID-19; which brought with it – significant health risks, and significant situations to my life that honestly, I never thought I’d see.
2020 was actually going to be a rough year for me anyway, as I moved towards focusing on caring for my elderly mother. I’d moved back home, and have been deciding what to start discarding in an almost Marie Kondo-esque fugue state. My home has always been filled to the brim with old knick knacks and gadgets, not to the excess you see on Marie Kondo’s show, but still – quite impressively full of old tech, clothes, and furniture.
There’s a lot to keep track of, and I’m in the process of decluttering my life. To do this, I’ve turned to a really interesting application that my friend and colleague, Matt, has pointed me to — Notion (https://notion.so). It’s kind of an all-in-one workspace style data collection application, kind of like Evernote.
It works across iOS, PC, Linux – it’s a web based application that’s very responsive. It provides a great way to take notes and keep organised, especially in the current hellscape of things in life right now.
The Analog Method for the Digital Age…
This year, started on a Monday, and coincidentally, I started a new experiment to stay organised and keep track of my day-to-day happenings. It’s called a Bullet Journal, and it’s a method of keeping a concise, goal/task-driven journal of daily happenings. It’s very free-form in nature, meaning that you don’t need a dedicated diary format to adhere to, or some specially printed book; any old exercise book can fit your needs!
My goals and desired outcomes were simple – I wanted a way to record my day to day events, whilst not losing focus of tasks and things that needed to be done, be it professionally, or personally. I also wanted to be able to do this, no matter where I am, as long as I had sufficient visibility, the journal, and a pen. I didn’t want to be beholden to battery power, or other nasty limitations.
And as a plus, I really enjoy the tactile feeling of just, writing something. For any seriously longer-form journal entries, there is of course, this very blog that you’re reading.
Before I go into my rant about Bullet Journals, and how I do them, and such – here’s the original site that I learnt about it from: https://bulletjournal.com — It’s kind of turned into some sort of online store/sales point – but the concepts are still visible and solid. There’s also about a hundred thousand people who’ve made videos about Bullet Journaling on YouTube and various other social media.
A rapid way of Journaling
The cornerstone of being able to use a bullet journal is based on a concept called Rapid Logging. It’s essentially a way to capture information, and notes as bulleted lists (with a small range of bullet types/symbols). It kind of looks like this (sorry about the huge gaps, these source images come with quite a bit of padding, and really, I thought it looked quite good!):
On the left, you see how someone might have a journal entry that’s somewhat longer form, but quite typical of a diary. On the right – you have something a little more ‘lean’. This is rapid blogging. You’ll notice that there’s different symbols for everything; and every bullet journal has their own symbols and guide (I’ll go through mine later) – but for now, the default ones you see in the tutorial image above are split into several types.
Has bullet journalling helped?
Yes. Emphatically, and simply, yes. It’s a focused, habitual and easy way to keep track of things, remind yourself of your goals and ideas, and really take a breather in your busy day.
My Personal BuJo Experience
Since this is my first bujo, and as reach the end of 2018 (and coincidentally, near the end of the book I use for it) – I thought I’d do a bit of a retrospective on the way I’ve used it, and things I’ve learnt.
My first BuJo involved a fair number of mistakes; initially so bad that I ripped out the first 20 or so pages of the book! (yikes!) But after some planning, and with (not quite) enough forethought, I managed to eke out a usable solution. I tried a variety of different symbols, and worked on how detailed I should make my daily log entries (everything from weather, to BSL and daily spends) and by the final quarter of 2018, I finally came up with a simple box and circle bullet point system, with simple daily labelling to help.
And in actual fact – by happy coincidence, I realise I can even type the method I use out:
[ ] = task
[x] = task done
[>] = rescheduled task
[-] = cancelled task
( ) = event/appointment
(x) = event done
(>) = rescheduled event
(-) = cancelled event
- thought/note
! important thought/note/reminder
? question/investigationThis absolutely doesn’t mean I’m going to use a typed version of my bullet journal however; the key point of the bujo is that it’s a physical, tactile experience that gets the brain some exercise! Being freeform also allows me to quickly customise pages or scribble out extra notes and so forth. However this DOES give me some ideas on how to do something of a bujo for devs 😉
Anyway, moving on – as we go into 2019 – the new BuJo I’ve worked on setting up today is going to include a couple of features I’ve seen around that I’d like to try out – such as a year in pixels, based on the mood of the day, I can colour in a square in a grid, with a corresponding colour to mood – and at the end of the year I should have a fairly pragmatic overview of just how well things went that year.