• I assisted to the OpenZFS leadership meeting.

I tried to continue following it since I left Sanmina. ZFS is really an amazing Software and it’s lead by an amazing Community of super cool Engineers and companies. I would like to continue contributing ASAP.

I bought some new hard drives in order to work a bit on this. You don’t need to have dedicated hardware if you want to test features. You can run in a VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation.

• I received more books about DevOps and Python

None is perfect. I see flaws in all of them and bad architecture practices*, however from all I learn interesting things.

*I guess that’s why I wrote my own book :)

You know, I study every day. At least 30 minutes, after work. As part of my healthy routines.

But I also study and learn during the work, as we have time available for this.

I’m very fortunate that Blizzard gives me time every day to study. That’s amazing. They also send us to events paying the ticket, travel, hotel, expenses… now with covid-19 we only go to virtual events, but the company still pay for this and give free days. Is a very nice company.

I use a lot Linux Academy too:

I continue having purchases of my book, and I’m very happy about that. I’m working on improving it and providing more contents and samples going from the scratch, with step by step code samples. From spaghetti code reading CSV files, to OOP with Full Coverage.

• My application for a Higher degree Computer Science Cloud Computing (Level 8) has been accepted. The Irish government pays me 90% of the degree, and Blizzard will pay me the other 10% after I pass the first year course.

I’m really grateful to this beautiful country, Ireland.

Having an Irish degree is something that brings me an special illusion.

• I have updated CTOP.py with some interesting features

It allows to pass a fixed width and height for the terminal render. That’s very useful when you run CTOP in a Docker non interactive session, or from a Cron, with the –iterations=1 so the output can be captured programmatically.

• Jetbrains has provided me with a Free License of all their products, in order to support my work in Open Source projects. That’s very nice. I’m using now mainly PyCharm and PhpStorm.

• At the beginning of the covid-19 I wrote a simulator in Python. That’s why I was able to anticipate that the number of cases and deaths would be very much higher when nobody around me knew what was going to happen. My first simulations were simple, and the algorithms were growing in complexity until I had a full rich Object Oriented modeler. Maybe I’ll write an article about this someday.
  • I based my data in https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
  • I studied the evolution of several countries and I was working with simulations in Spain until their government started blocking the information and stop providing transparent and accurate metrics.

• I’m seeing how the covid is affecting and transforming several kind of business:
  • Meetup.com I see meetups with more than 1,000 users closing, as they are no meeting anymore
  • Airlines, obviously
  • Hotels, offering less services
  • Metasearchers and OTAs (Online travel agencies)
  • I can imagine the impact on airbnb
  • Discos, nightclubs are closing doors
  • Restaurants, they will lose the Christmas season (with families and companies doing lunch and dinners)
• At the same time, other companies are hitting records in sales
  • Videogames companies
  • Hardware is being sold, to accommodate WFH and remote working.
  • Companies like Amazon or Overstock.com are delivering well where people before were buying into stores.
  • VPN solutions for Remote Working are being implemented in those places that had not enabled Remote Working.
  • People are moving back to towns and villages, saving the huge amounts of rent, and doing Remote. I enjoyed this article from Irish Times: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/remote-working-in-the-west-so-far-it-s-been-great-really-surprising-1.4340998

• After doing a Masterclass to some colleagues about Refactor, Code Reliability, Quality, The non-happy path and Unit Testing, I’m preparing some contents that I’ll publish to the Community soon. So far I created this repo, where I added the source code for lesson 0: starting to program in Python videos that I created few months ago to help beginners.

https://gitlab.com/carles.mateo/teach-unit-testing/-/tree/master/lesson0

I also added some contents to lesson 1, where we refactor pure spaghetti code with no error control, to something more elaborated with unit testing and full code coverage. Still procedural, but I will jump to next class in two weeks, where we will move to OOP and Dependency Injection.

• Here my “Harley” assembled :)