Almost a year ago since I wrote about my DNS filtering setup. I’ve enjoyed using that setup, but the interface into Cloudflare for teams wasn’t that friendly, and was clearly geared much more towards enterprise managemnt than end use. So over the last few weeks I decided to do a little redesign of my dns filtering system. I’ve heard great things about NextDNS, and so far it has lived up to expectations.
Seasonal change has a way of making me feel reflective, and the transition from Summer to Autumn usually does it more than the others. This year it’s only amplified as I approach my forth decade. While I didn’t grow up on a farm, we were surrounded by fields. Whether it was the appearance of hay bales, the smell of peanuts being turned over to dry or the blizzards of cotton coming into bloom, there were visceral reminders.
These days I don’t get much time to write code. In a lot of ways Outlook and Zoom have become my most used Integrated development Environments, and my emacs sessions are much more likely to involve markdown for a slidedeck than code for a module. But, like I’ve talked about here before I still look at both my practical coding skills and theoretical computational science knowledge as indespencable. And I expect the same the managers and directors on my engineering teams.
Today I am thankful for the process, and the markers along the way. The last few months I have been working towards getting healthier. I realize that it is not something that is never going to end, but it is nice to celebrate doing the things that I’ve never done before. Today that thing was being part of an organized 5k, the ubiqitious Thanksgiving morning Turkey Trot, and the 40 degree weather that came along with it.
Previously I talked about using command line tools for efficiency in Command Line Leadership. Since then I’ve changed my flow a bit. LaTex is a fantastic system, and Beamer is great but the templates didn’t have the right look. They were a bit too “academic” in feel. I’ve moved to using RevealJS instead. The included css has a bit more modern feel and is easier to customize than getting into a Beamer template.