The picture was taken on Otaki Kite Festival 2020. The little penguin, teddy bear and other little buddies are driving the virus(played by a puffer fish kite) out of the their home land. 2 months later, the country-wide lock-down is announced.
April 2020 to April 2021, the silent year.
I started new job as Senior Cloud Native Developer to develop and maintain the devops pipelines and stand cloud stacks for global internal partners from Dec 2019. The first season was full of fun. We spent a happy holiday back to Nanjing, visited relatives and friends, enjoyed the Shanghai Disney tour. I walked through the pipelines, rehearsalled small innovation, developed tools to streamline the stack standing works and glad to see the team liked it - on the united objective to speed up cloud stack delivery. I also flied to Sydney for an on-site training.
Revised 6 months later
The covid-19 suddenly changed many things. We stayed home together to fight the pandemic. We placed orders online - I still remember in the first few weeks the countdown delivery slots were only available on Mon and Wed certain time, it became fully booked quickly. We struggled to learn how do do home schooling - which was hard for young kids to focus on zoon screen and read interested information from the unfamiliar atomsphere of anxiety. I confess I didn't realize human beings have such a strong adaptability to get ourselves used to new life pattern quietly.
One of the facts is there is no blog update from April 2020 to April 2021. We were not always locked down - actually in most of time there were no realistic restrictions to domestic activities. Material shortage was resolved in 2-3 months. I had the chance to design and implemnet the orchestration core python package and it worked beyond expectations. Then I joined another project where my initiatives were implemented to equip a data-model to Etcd data and off-load the network-flow applications. As long as working from home, I could see a high productivity. In life balance, we spent a lovely Christmas holiday in Hawksbay. I read a list of books via eReader on Python, Golang, k8s, walked thru blogcasts like blockchain and history topics. I even learned how to build mobile apps with React-Native and built new toys with my own firebase account. During the phase, I created an online group of badminton - it has 50+ local members now and we play games each Sat. However, there were also many things happened which we could only absorb by ourselves with family supports. Our behavior patterns are changed, slowly and unnoticeably in the background.
But when I take a retrospective, I could feel lackness of participation. It's not straightly related to productivity or innovation - it's an engagement with buddies in multiple dimensions, local community, technical meetups, friends and family. When we reduce face-to-face social activities, the online activities are also impacted. In facts I have a better productivity in work and self-studies but less chance to summarize the progressed topics. The action plan is straight - looking around and reaching out to people.
I draft a short list of topics and start to take periodical time to have a look around, summarize and share the thoughts and feelings. Buddies know I've taken systemtical badminton training for a while, yes - badminton for sure is one of them. I will share the lessons and experiences in movement correction, footworks, power stroke, jump smash and how to do self-training in yard. Large size event is still restricted - for example the Cloud Native Summit NZ has been postponed - but small get-gether within a few people is still okay for the time being - there are plenty of chances to join local associate catch-ups and local golang, cloud, rust workshops.
The list includes below topics and targeted to 50% coverage in 12 months
Python Programming Tips: generic data model, borg pattern, commander pattern
Golang Programming Topics: k8s operator programming, CRD object model, declarative API design, k8s ingress management
Devops Topics: migrating apps in helm chart, charts for DevOps, open application model
Badminton Topics: Footworks, Power Stroke, Smash Practice Points, attack patterns in mixed double games
(Pending): Sharing the stories in India and US travels of early years
(Pending): Wellington attractive locations, Local technical communities
Hi 2021, a late greeting 🤝
Change Log
Nov21, 2021: Re-post the image and re-deploy with updated hexo config. May01, 2021: Initial post draft.