Hello! It’s been a while!
My last post was last June of 2021 which was over 6 months ago. I realized after starting the site that as chaotic as my day job was, a new post a week here was fairly aggressive and I was not able to keep up. I at least wanted to do check-ins and talk about games but even that was challenging. I handle things better if I’m in the habit of doing them on a regular basis as a habit vs ‘just remembering’ for a monthly check-in or quarterly check-in. That being said, this has been a good learning experience, and am excited to be writing again.
Last Half of 2021 and Job Transition
Shortly after posting my last video games post in June, I realized that I needed to make a career change. It was one of those thoughts that start as a combination of stress and anxiety which builds into dissatisfaction and daily misery. It can be challenging to recognize (at least for me) the difference between “normal stress” and job dissatisfaction as they present to me in nearly identical ways. June I was feeling it, July I was wondering for the first time in a long while if it was time (or past time) to move on. By the end of August, I had discussed with my wife about a job change and in September I started floating the idea with my direct leadership. The dissatisfaction moved from concept to reality when I submitted my resignation at the end of October for a 12/31 last day. 2-ish month resignation, you say? Yep. Isn’t that too long you may ask? Uhh, yes. Yes, it is. Let me explain…
I have watched what I’d charitably refer to as the ‘goat rodeo’ of people leaving throughout my career which causes an unbelievable amount of (what I feel as) unnecessary chaos. Those circumstances have people submitting their two weeks, taking a couple of days off within that two weeks, and with a very GTFO mindset doing very little to nothing for their fellow associates, shareholders, and clients/customers. I wanted to be different and hopefully set a better example by providing a smooth transition with full transparency. Since this was the first time I’d quit a job that was a ‘career’ job, I wanted to make sure that I did the best I could to enable those who came after me to truly succeed.
I won’t pretend that submitting my resignation at the end of October was fully altruistic, it was also partly for my own mental health. By end of October, I had been living with knowing it was time to move on for months at that point and it was really weighing on me. Those closest to me at work knew my intentions, and when I officially submitted I alerted all of my direct reports and leadership team (which may have reported to leaders who report to me). I honestly thought that doing this would lift a huge weight, which it did but created another challenge – motivation.
The month of November and very early December were filled with transition discussions (as well as very nice farewell gatherings) while I tried very hard to make good on the transparent and aim for a smooth transition. By mid-December, the workplace was filled with people ready for the holidays. Having completed the transition work I moved to an ‘open-book’ type of support mode of being available for anyone with questions to answer. The days dragged on a bit and it was tough to stay focused and engaged, but luckily it was a relatively short distance from mid-December to the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
My final day came, I handed in my corporate-owned devices and said farewell to an 18 and a half year-long journey with all of the amazing friendships and generally relationships that entails.
Holidays and Birthday
To be honest, the next few weeks flew by. Unfortunately, our household was hit with COVID-19 which separated us from the larger family at Christmas. Though looking on the bright side, it was the first Christmas we were able to spend in this house as we go every year to my parent’s house. It was nice and we played games, my parents brought some food for us which was awesome (and I ate too much… way too much!).
I was also able to tackle an item on my list, painting my beige office gray. Of course, I got paint in my hair but I figured it blended in well with the gray already coming in naturally! I was also able to convert the lights in my office (including the closet fluorescent) to LED, which was something I was wanting to do for a while now but hadn’t made the time.
My 40th birthday followed a couple of weeks after Christmas which was fantastic. We were able to get together with my parents as COVID had left us by that point. Had an amazing dinner brought in from Bucca di Beppo – their chicken parmesan is amazing and the best I’ve had in KC.
Learning and Site Migration
Toward the end of 2021 into the start of 2022, I knew I wanted to learn more about the more recent technologies I wasn’t able to do anything with at work. Namely Kubernetes and other containerized applications. I knew I didn’t want to pay WordPress ~$100 per year to host my blog so I set about figuring out how to do self-hosting in a cost-effective way using containerization with a 10-year-old desktop I have running a hypervisor called Proxmox. As time allowed I taught myself Kubernetes – I use ‘taught myself’ loosely as there are so many youtube videos and articles out on the internet it wasn’t a huge deal. With a working Kubernetes cluster up and running I exported my site data from my WordPress hosted site and imported it to my self-hosted site. I’ll be detailing this journey in an upcoming post with quite a bit of specifics of everything I’m using and how it all comes together.
Site Updates / Slight Redesigns
Now that I had my site self-hosted, I needed to go back and take a look at all of my posts to make sure everything survived ok. Sadly, the picture linking was hardcoded to the old site URL so I needed to re-link all of my images. It does seem to be a somewhat common problem, I do still need to figure out if I can future proof this if I need to migrate again moving forward. While I was re-linking I decided to use Grammarly and corrected so many grammatical issues I didn’t catch before. I honestly am loving this app and would recommend it to anyone who is trying to improve their writing.
After going back through the historical posts and correcting them, I played around with the overall site design, menu structure, and general aesthetics. I wrapped that over the last few days and am ready to start posting again which makes me happy!
What’s Next
I’ve been taking notes of ideas as I see them, so I have a ton of ideas on what I want to write about, some below in the relatively near future.
- Video Games – Need to catch up and write my 2020 and 2021 lists of best games I’ve played, my top 10 games of all time,
- Life Lessons – Thinking of a series to help me prepare for discussions with my daughter I want to have on things I’ve learned throughout life that I didn’t learn in school but have colored my approach to life
- Tech bits – I want to research and write about different technologies – NFTs, Wireless security, TV display technology, video game emulation, how QR codes work
- Tech projects – I want to write about the journey of standing up a self hosted site, open source software project I want to work on, CI/CD and incorporating that into some development efforts I want to do
- Random thoughts – My experience with goldentee, top golf/t-shotz