Technology in 2021 sucks. It really does just suck.

First and foremost, 2020 was a weird year. In trying to plan for 2021, there are so many unknowns in my life that made this list difficult. I apologize about this list being vague in some parts. I wanted to give myself some room to be flexible about action steps in case things need to be retooled.

Podcasting

I want to learn how to podcast. I adore listening to podcasts and I think there is a lot of potential with audio entertainment and I want to experiment in this space. My vision is a podcast about the history/present/future of home automation where I get to riff with a friend and fellow podcast enthusiast. I also want to provide a written transcript on the podcast website as a reference and to be more accessible.

TypeScript

Unfortunately, it seems that JavaScript is going to stay around for awhile. As much as I dislike the tooling and ecosystem, for some projects I’m working on it seems that JS is the way to go. I want to use TypeScript to at least get type safety and a compiler to check my errors. People who know me know that I have a weird love of Rust. I hope that TypeScript can make JS a little bit more pleasant.

Advertising Myself

I have been working through an idea on offering consulting or “coaching” for medium sized businesses that want to implement machine learning into their systems. I want it to be like a partnership, where they come to me with problems and ideas and I build out solutions and tooling for them. The market for this idea seems sizable, my issues are that I do not know how to advertise myself.

WASM

I think there is some serious potential in learning to use wasm. It is extremely powerful, but I need to learn the ins and outs to be able to understand when to write a project in WebAssembly. Even if I do not ever use it with a project, wasm just absolutely fascinates me. I mean for example this project: https://github.com/rhysd/vim.wasm

How neat!

Modern marketing revolves around data. Modern data. Big data. Small data. All the data. Statistics and analytics words get thrown around the industry all the time. Endless pieces on the internet talking about how to intrepret this, how to intrepret that, etc. There is a problem to all of this though. The industry is all bullshit.

Changing existing branches

As we prepare for GitHub to completely switch over to main as the default branch, I have been doing some cleanup on projects I have not yet pushed. GitHub is working on a tool to transfer over already pushed repos by the end of the year. That tool will “seamlessly” transfer open PRs, draft PRs and branch protection policies. I’m impatient and want to get into the habit of switching to the new naming scheme now, so here is a braindump of things I have done so far.

I found an interesting command today while working on some MySQL databases for my company. I was getting annoyed at the spaghetti code that would from out of the table when I used the commandline.

SELECT * FROM TABLE;

I would try to use this view my tables. I would have to limit my rows to keep the spaghetti to a minimum. I finally gave up and googled around until I found this command.

pager less -SFX

Yesterday, I was working on SQL code that would truncate the table, pull the newest data of completed jobs by a department with an Action_Date (just the time the job was completed) of GetDate() - 366 (so one year back from the current date) and then inserts that into the empty table. This took about half an hour to run, which was acceptable on the daily AM job schedule.