So, what's next?

Using methods from Slow Productivity to better plan work

Now that I feel I can take my gaze away from my infrastructure, what do I want to work on now? I am going to do a follow up post, perhaps a standalone piece on my website where I really deep dive into the why’s of my self hosting journey. I touch on it at points throughout my posts and I feel like having a condensed piece that goes over everything, will be good for me to just get it all written down and to have a resource to refer to when I get asked the question “well why are you a lunatic?” haha

One day in 2024 after doing one of my longest practice drives ever, from home to Dunmanway, Waterford, we had elected to browse the shopping centre after having some coffee. When in Easons I came across the cover for a book, Slow Productivity, The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport. I have a few books of Cal’s in my digital library but I’m happy to admit I have not read them yet. Honestly reading in general, even though I’m extremely fast at it (330 words per minute), I don’t do it often. The concept of the book stuck with me, when I read the blurb at the back. But at the time I didn’t feel like making the purchase, due to the aforementioned low frequency of reading.

The book stuck in my head though and a week or two later, I tracked down Easons in Cork and picked up a physical copy. That in of itself, buying physical was a distinct choice as I felt if I was going to read, I’d like to do it with a physical book for a change at least. My Kindle was retired long ago in lieu of my iPad, but even then I felt like so much of my life is screen based, a physical book could feel nice. And feel nice, it did. I started the book early one Saturday afternoon and blasted my way through it, to have it concluded by the evening. This included stopping and taking notes, as it felt quite truly, to have been seen in terms of struggling to quantify a metric for what being productive means in the tech world. This isn’t a book review and certainly I’m not going to paraphrase everything. However I strongly recommend giving it a read if you’re in the tech world, even with my own insane reading speed, it’s still a quite quick read.

With the help of the book, I’ve organised several overarching objectives, which I then narrow down into projects which they themselves, break down into tasks. Each being an order of magnitude smaller in terms of suggested duration. For example, months, to a few weeks, to a task being ideally done in a day. I was using this system during my cluster woes I recently described, as one of my overarching objectives was to have a fully local Kubernetes cluster. I couldn’t finish out the objective till everything was stable!! But when I finished that, I had three new objectives to set for myself, which you can find below.

1. Content Creation Uplift

While it was effectively a trauma dumping session spread out over several weeks, writing about and sharing what I was going through in blog posts was both cathartic and enjoyable. Sharing them and getting good feedback / people appreciating getting a peek behind the curtain, really got me to appreciate blogging again. In the past it’s more been writing for myself and not really sharing it in the world. So I want to try and change that.

Parts of this objective involve just brushing up and giving my personal website a good coat of polish. So most likely a new minor release (if you don’t know, I have a Release Tracker where I track all the software and services I maintain along with sharing release notes) where I clean some cobwebs and just give it all some love. For example in the most recent release of the website, I fixed a typo in the credits section of every post that had been present for several years haha.

The biggest thing to come out of this, and this will serve as the announcement for those of you who get this far in the post, I will be launching a podcast. People have told me repeatedly I should do this, and honestly I tended to brush it off. I did have some plans before, if you dig through the post history here you will see that there was indeed a post where I gave up before I even started haha. But with the encouragement from friends, I’ve elected to at least give it a shot. These posts can be quite long, I’m already at roughly ~824 words, so the podcast is actually gonna be me dictating these blog posts. It will be something simple to get started with, but once I get up off the ground I have ideas for a second podcast that will basically be more updates in what my self hosting world is currently like, just done a bit more “live” really. More on that and the podcasting in general, when the time comes!

2. Foundational API Development

Part of my desires and objectives around Self Hosting also involve writing code. My background was always software development and part of me has always wanted to revisit it. I love infrastructure and that my career is based around it, but if you’ve been reading of late you can understand why sometimes I just don’t want to look at it! I’ve many ideas for some APIs of my own, and I’ve run some basic ones in the past. Part of this objective, will involve rewriting one of the APIs from the past to be ready for my present. I am also hoping that this will enable me to learn new patterns and use some of the patterns I’ve read about in the past, such as test driven development and 12 factor apps

Some projects here will involve getting my GitHub Action for Java up to date along with getting my Config Store, basically just Spring Cloud Config Server, redeployed. Monitoring these applications is also going to be an interesting challenge so that is part of it too. Following this I want to work on a notifications API that will probably be one of the busiest services of mine initially. Previously I build notification capability directly into my apps, but now I want this as an API. Finally, the app that I will be restoring from my past, is around cloud cost monitoring. It’s always important to manage costs, but especially as an individual so you don’t get a nasty surprise. So getting this reworked to get data from the cloud providers that I use, then sending me an email via the aforementioned notification API, will be really really nice.

As the overarching objective name implies, this is just the start. I’ve many more ideas and hopes, if this goes well for me it’ll be the catalyst that I need to really get going on said ideas!

3. Enhancements to Existing Endeavours (ET3)

Finally, this one I gave the acronym ET3 because well, saying and typing the full name would be annoying. Effectively this just is to continue with some of the ideas I have for things I already use today. Predominately this is for my Terraform modules, they all have their own little roadmaps for resources I would like to manage with Terraform. It’s more code writing, albeit HCL and its infrastructure, but there’s at least a bit of a gap so it doesn’t quite feel like being back in that world.

Right now the plan is to release minor updates for six of my Terraform modules and also release two brand new Terraform modules with major versions. I also plan to do a major bump of my Packer image and rebuild some of the lost datasets of my self hosted applications from previous infrastructure snafus. If there’s anything else that I feel needs to be enhanced to support my second objective, it’ll happen here too.

All coming together

I will pick and choose from these three objectives for hopefully just the next two to three months. There is of course a misc. objective, that is present but not really acknowledged. Just for that random stuff that can crop up from time to time. That I’m sure will be also looked at if I end up getting sick of all three formalised objectives haha. I’m looking forward to jumping in, getting things done and also reporting back here on it all!