Posts

Showing posts from October, 2020

Context Switching

Image
The precise meaning of the phrase "context switch" varies. In a multitasking context, it refers to the process of storing the system state for one task, so that task can be paused and another task resumed. A context switch can also occur as the result of an interrupt. - Wikipedia The image is from WakaTime.  https://wakatime.com is a great app.  I track myself with it so I can improve. Sometimes a developer will take more than a day to complete work. The best way for me to get things done is to put my head down and focus.  If I'm interrupted or given too much to do at once the quality of that work goes down or might take longer to complete.  Bouncing around and not getting things done is a problem of context switching. Multitasking is a great thing until it isn't.  In the chart above, the project in blue and the project in green lasted all week.  If that work was bunched together the green project would have been completed on Tuesday instead of Thursday and...

Not Having Continuous Deployment Makes Me Grumpy

Image
  And the monkey flips the switch. I have the DevOps duties at work. I'm good at it.  I've been on a lot of small-ish teams and needed to automate things in my past.  The problem with all that DevOps experience is that I'm spoiled. I think it is beneath me to deploy code all day every day.  I enjoy scripting and automation.  I can see the benefit in it. Unfortunately, my continuous deployment capability has been removed recently.  The cloud hosting provider was changed and I can't get access to the CI/CD solution for that platform.  If I was given access it would save everyone time and money but it is off limits. I still have the development integration server fully automated but not much else.  That makes things easy on the other developers but doesn't make things easy for testing, staging and production releases.  Since I'm the only person on the team doing the manual things, I'm not only bored, I'm jealous. So how do I fix this? Delegate I...