Carl Chesser

Documenting Repairs # Life is busy. Outside of the typical workday, a recurring time investment of mine revolves around repairing mechanical things. Things that are not of the software world, but things that naturally decay and fail based on environmental factors. As we age, it is easy to accumulate more things, which require maintenance or diagnosing to repair. This spawns growing TODO lists, and scheduled reminders on things to inspect and replace. While this blog has been a place where I have previously shared notes and thoughts about software development, I thought I would start adding notes on random things I have had to diagnose or repair. Some of these things are quite simple and thought it would be of value to share as I couldn’t find anything online and answered my problem.

DevOpsDays KC returned this week since 2019! It was awesome to see so many faces I hadn’t seen in years. It was a nice two days, at the Madrid Theathre, local food trucks for lunch, and great discussions.

I wanted to discuss a term that I found memorable recently: ground truth. It resonated with me when I first heard it, as I’m routinely in discussions where we are articulating technical problems and how we plan to solve them. This act of describing the problem to an audience with varying levels of understanding can be challenging. We often have limited time in how we bring people to shared understanding. This restricts our ability to sufficiently describe all the history and contributing factors of that problem. By having a close understanding to what is occurring, the better we can articulate this understanding with others. In this post, I will dig into the term “ground truth” and some considerations in the words we use when sharing this understanding.

Over the last year, I have found myself trying to establish new routines. With working more from home, I wanted to make subtle changes in different aspects in my life. For example, I previously used to enjoy podcasts on my drive to work. Now, I focus on listening to these while I do chores around the house. In this blog post, I will share how I found an effective way of establishing a new habit through something simple which happens to have science behind it. I hope this is helpful if you are looking at ways to be effective in new habit building too.

These last two days were KCDC in Kansas City for me. This was my first in-person developer conference since late 2019. While there were still restrictions (wearing masks), it was a fantastic time to see people again. I was able to meet up with past colleagues and discover new people at lunch and through talks, an experience that immediately filled a void in my life. While I have participated in other virtual conferences since the pandemic started, the in-person session was a great experience. Everyone I talked to also shared the same feedback.