2017-04 on Funky Si's Blog (Dev)

GitHub history

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Mon, 24 Apr 2017 20:00:45 +0000

I created my GitHub account in August 2010, lets look at what I have done with it.

In 2010 I started by committing the code for an old php website I had created. Then in December I committed some other php sites.

Between 12 December 2010 and 29 September 2011 I must have created some automated process which is why there is a commit every day. Looking at the diff it appears to be related to tracking visitors to a site. I assume back then I hadn’t heard of the .gitignore file!

Nothing for a few years until 2014, when I started compiling a code samples collection, this is bits of code that I want to show off, I have added to this since 2015 so I really should go back to this as my skills have developed a bit since then.

In 2015 I really started to think of myself as a developer, I added repositories for Raspberry Pi, and a few C# ideas I had. I ended the year taking part in Advent of Code

What did I do last year? Well I started going to York Code Dojo and this meant lots of forks from their code examples and also my first pull request. I also did a fair bit of looking at other repositories trying to find a good open source project to contribute to, still not found one for me yet. Lastly I ended 2016 with a bit of Advent of Code.

Not sure how enthralling a blog post this is, but fascinating to see the different commit histories.

Automating promotion of my blog

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 20:00:45 +0000

I would like to automate the promotion of this blog. Currently to promote this blog on social media I use a few different services.

Buffer (buffer.com ) is a service that allows you to schedule updates to the main social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+)

IFTTT or If This Then That (ifttt.com ) is a service that allows you to connect different online services. You can send an email when a specific event occurs in your calendar for example.

I have been using a combination of these services to share to social media some of my past blog posts. I then add to my calendar details of my blog posts. Then I use IFTTT to add the event to Buffer, and then buffer tweets on a schedule.

This works great however it is a manual process to add my posts to my calendar. I have been using a spreadsheet to help me generate an ics calendar file which I import into my google calendar. There must be a better way of doing this.

I have written some code that reads the RSS feed of my blog and then shares that to Buffer using the Buffer API. The code I am creating is far from finished however I am trying to use the concepts of clean code to make it as flexible as possible.

I have an interface called ISocial which my buffer code implements, but it would be easy to add a class that implements the same interface but uses the twitter or facebook APIs. My code reads from a specific WordPress RSS feed, but it should be easy enough to adapt to read from a SQL database or any other data source.

I am currently unsure what kind of interface to use for this application. I could create a web page that controls the functionality, or maybe just a windows application, or maybe both of these are complicating things and all I need is just a console application that could be added as a scheduled task.

Blame

funkysi1701@gmail.com (funkysi1701) — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 20:00:45 +0000

I recently came home from a busy day of work to my wife blaming me for allowing our 18 month old son to reach some paint and get it all over the carpet. She was concentrating on the fact that he could reach the paint not on the fact that she had brilliantly got the paint out of the carpet.

My instinct on being blamed is to deny it, or start throwing blame back at her. It is possible I put the paint in his reach, it is also possible it was someone else.

It is very easy to blame someone else. For example, looking through the git history to find out who changed a specific file is only a few clicks.

But is it ever productive to blame someone? Is it not better to focus our energy on fixing the issue at hand?

In the world of business it is easy to go from blaming other people until you have a blame culture. When you have a blame culture everyone starts looking out for themselves so it’s not them that gets the blame and productivity will suffer.

I think it is more important to put in place processes to minimise issues happening again. If a deployment causes downtime, don’t ask who’s fault is it and sack them. Instead what can we do to reduce the chance of it happening again?

As someone who has an interest in DevOps, I often break things and don’t want to get blamed for that, I do want to improve my processes so I am not always breaking the same things.

What do you think about Blame? Is what can we do differently always better than who did this?