And the lessons they taught me about life.
Towards the end of February I started thinking a lot about my future and where I want to be in the next ten years and the truth is that I really have no idea, the only thing I know, is that I want to be much better off than I am now.
So I decided to write some goals, ambitious and crazy, one of them was to read 100 books this year, and since I hadn’t read any self-improvement books for a really long time, I decided to focus mostly on that to begin with. I started a book to…
My experience and how I did it
The Certification List
- GCP Professional Network Engineer
- GCP Professional Security Engineer
- GCP Professional Data Engineer
- GCP Professional Cloud Developer
- GCP Professional DevOps Engineer
- GCP Professional Collaboration Engineer
Why do so many in such a short time?
There are multiple reasons why I decided to go all out on GCP certs in such a short amount of time:
One of my Forrest Gump Streaks
From time to time I get obsessed with something and that’s literally all I will do; morning, afternoon and evening. Before joining Contino I challenged myself to read a book a day for a month, and I ended up reading 47 books in about 6 weeks. I love having occasional moments of intensity like this.
My Employer’s Generous Training Budget
And why I will use Signal exclusively from now on
TLDR
- Check this awesome slides (which you can use as your WhatsApp status), courtesy of this Reddit post
Hustling friends into Signal
Today I deleted WhatsApp. I have been using Signal for years now almost exclusively but I kept it as a backup purely due to its mass appeal.
On paper WhatsApp sounds okay. The original founders were great, and they enabled end-to-end encryption before they left unhappy with how Facebook handled privacy. However I have a hard time trusting Facebook, for very much the same reasons why most people dislike it.
And this as well:
As you can infer from the founder’s values, Facebook…
Never buy mediocre eggs again!
Introduction
I am a little obsessed with finding great quality eggs here in the UK so I wanted to keep a list for myself and share it with everyone on the best ones I could find. I will try to keep updating this post as I find more great egg brands.
Spotting great quality eggs is fairly easy
Great eggs have golden, intense dark orange yolks, the darker the yolk, generally speaking, the better the egg. A mediocre egg, on the other hand, has a pale yellow colour and the flavour is not as rich — this is the egg that most people are used to. …
Some things I found confusing or did not like about Vault
Vault is, for the most part, great. Currently I don’t know of any other product that comes close to provide what it does, even for all the hundreds of managed tools and services that GCP and AWS provide, the closest I’ve seen is GCP’s secret manager, but even that doesn’t offer dynamic secrets so Vault is still the best there is as far as I know in this domain.
That being said, this article is not a love letter extolling all its virtues, mostly is a therapy session listing some things I wish were better about it and the issues…
Four things you can do to minimise yak shaving
You wake up in the morning in a very good mood; you have some exciting ideas for your new project, let’s say migrating your microservices to kubernetes, or improve the monitoring of the whole company, your CI/CD pipelines, or whatever tickles your fancy.
But first you need to do a very simple task for another team, you need to create an AWS resource to spin a new service and give it the correct role permissions. Should be a five minute thing, and then you can start working on your dreams.
Look for a person, not an ideal.
Recently a friend of mine told me he had found the most perfect girl he had ever met and he was totally smitten. Conversation was amazing; she was beautiful, funny, engaging, proactive and seemed to have a lot of interesting life and career goals. …
When deluding yourself can be a good thing…
In Spain we have a saying, “Piensa mal y acertaras”, which roughly translates as “think the worst and you won’t be far from wrong”. This nugget of Spanish wisdom is probably a shield against a culture of espabilado, and it may be useful on occasion to take this approach, but someone who is always “pensando mal” will rarely ever be happy.
Malpensado is another Spanish word that doesn’t have a very good translation in English. …
How a culture of “espabilados” can ruin a country
The ideas and opinions presented here are my own, based on my observations and exposure to multiple cultures. If you feel that I am wrong, I would love to hear your counterargument in the comments, just please be civil and constructive.
Many years ago while working at a hotel’s restaurant in Ibiza there was a guest on the slow side that was always buzzing around in an out of the restaurant into the pool.
One day I saw him stealing crips from the counter and I called him out on it, to which he apologised embarrassedly and walked away briskly.
…
AWS is the best platform to showcase how great GCP is…
I originally posted this on Reddit so I could get a good sample of opinions from other engineers to see how they compared to mine before posting and expanding here. This is my opinion based on my experience with both platforms (two years in each). My bias towards GCP is mostly based on the superior experience I have gotten with it and I am in no way affiliated with Google. AWS is still my second choice as an enterprise option for cloud platform and it would be nice for them to do better. …
