Excuses, excuses, excuses #

Unfortunately I totally missed May for publishing a post here, which I’m a little disappointed about which is why today I thought I’d write an entry. It was also partly inspired by seeing that we’re already halfway through 2022, which seems mental! So in the spirit of checking in; Hello again!

I think without making too many excuses as the title suggests, it can be quite daunting to ‘put pen to paper’. I can put too much pressure on myself to come up with the perfectly crafted tech blog post, when really consistency should be key even if it’s not perfect - and shouldn’t only be tech focused!. This is my first attempt at publishing articles in a domain I manage, but also I don’t want to just post about my professional life, there’s a lot more to daily life than coding (although it can be very rewarding). I mean I once had an 8 streak on Worldle and I haven’t yet written a post about it!!!

However, there are a few topics I’m working on to do write-ups for in the very near future that I think will be interesting:

Fitness
- Road biking 🚴‍♂️ 🚵‍♂️
- Weight Lifting 🏋️‍♂️
Re familiarising with GraphQL
- During May my team at Sky Betting & Gaming did a Hackathon around GraphQL for some upcoming work in our team. It was fascinating, especially looking at how far framework support has come. Using tools provided by Spring & Micronaut.
- I did lean towards Micronauts support, purely down to how fast we got something up and running. The documentation was clear and it was a great experience!
Kotlin Coroutines
- So far I’ve got by without a lot of Coroutine / Threading experience. I want to fix that, and publish a post about my L&D surrounding it. Rather than do the same thing over and over
Kotlin Lambdas with Terraform

Note; Kotlin Lambda’s swiftly changed, right after I posted:

Cracked some really neat stuff with @micronautfw this evening with their cloud function support integrating with CDK!

Got a lovely Kotlin lambda, with infra written up in CDK via Kotlin too! Quite impressed with the outcome! Web post coming soon!
— James Millner (@_jamesmillner) June 7, 2022

I want to like CDK, but Terraform being so declarative just seems to get off the ground faster. Hence, the change of tact; however I might go back and revisit the Micronaut cloud functions. After all as a starter it gets you up and running fast, but I think you’d need to invest a lot of time into CDK to get its value. Terraform works pretty much off the shelf, and the documentation for it is so good. More detail in another post!

As a final note I’ve also been tweaking and adjusting this site slightly! Check out below, I’ve even been able to implement a comment section using utteranc.es! I’ve been really impressed with Hugo & Congo, it does make it really easy to get setup and running with a site like this. If you’re interested in setting your own site up like this, I’ve publicised the repo on my github. Anyway, for now I’ll sign off this post and post something again soon!