Month note
30 Apr 2023Month notes are back! Well, sort of. I’m in the midst of a rather awful cold and have mush for brains at the moment. In lieu of a thoughtful topic-based piece here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to.
Launching sarahyoung.tech
I fulfilled a career bucketlist item by creating my own website with my own domain.
This was something I wanted to do since I graduate from Makers Academy in 2014 and have finally found/made the time.
Dreams really do come true.
Part of what put me off the task when I was a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed newbie developer was feeling intimidated by the process.
However time, experience building and deploying websites, and a resurgence of my “how hard could this be” gene reduced that sense of intimidation to zero.
My site is hosted using AWS Amplify and was remarkably easy to set up. I followed the steps in this blog and this one. It was surprisingly straightforward.
The only “gotcha” was deciphering how to register the CNAME with the domain (the AWS documentation is pretty good, but one or two parts were a bit confusing). The feedback loop took 48 hours which was understandable but less than ideal when playing around with things.
Submitting conference talks
I’ve submitted a few talk proposals to DevOps Days Seattle. If accepted it will be my first time speaking at a big conference, another career bucketlist item, and I’m very excited.
The talks I proposed were:
- Lessons for the next pandemic: reflections from a UK government COVID response project
- Transforming conflicts into catalysts for change
- The most important loop you’ve never heard of
- Welcome to the Linux House
Keeping my fingers crossed.
Volunteering at Ada Developer Academy
It really has been a month of working through my bucketlist. As a graduate of a dev bootcamp I’ve always wanted to give back in some form by volunteering at a boot camp.
I’ve signed up to be a volunteer tutor at Ada Developer Academy and then an industry mentor in August.
Ideally I’d like to do both but I will pace myself first.