But Please, Awk to Me

Mostly a Place for me!

I wanted to have a place for me. Just me. This will get better. We will evolve.

I am technical. I started out as a programmer (please don’t get me started…names, titles, all bullshit…but a rant for another time) So, what is the difference between a developer, a programmer, and a coder? Okay, I started out as a computer enineer. It was a sweet gig. You built things. You programmed them. It started me down my automation path.

I am observational. I see things that just don’t make sense. I see people saying one thing and doing something else. I want to order and meaning and organization. I dislike entropy.

I am multifaceted. I love what I do. I can get hyperfocused and ‘disappear’ for hours in something that has grabbed my attention. But…

I am easily distracted. By that next thing that comes along and grabs my attention

I am curious. So, I flit from one interest to the next until that next thing grabs my attention.

I want to document all of ths above. So, this is not a technical blog. It is not a personal blog. It is not organized…

But, it is… because it is for me… it is about me… and the mood I happen to be in. I will try to do a good job tagging and classifying so that I can revisit my last stream of consciousness and try to find those things now that were previously my primary focus.

What Interests me Right Now?

Notes Management

It started out more about understanding and being able to use the tools around me. OpenSearch for example. I support developers (okay, programmers) who use it. But what does it do? How do I better understand it? What can I do with it? If I know how it is used, if I can try to do something useful with it, then I become better at supporing the tool. I become better at helping those who are tasked with using it to be better at it. I understand its idiosyncrasies and become better as supporting it.

I have become a bit ahem.. hyper-focused… with what is notes management. How to take good notes, how to make it useful. How can I make those notes more manageable.

So, as an example… right now at least, I think a note should be a single item. It should have a title and a description that can clearly and succinctly define what the note is about. The note itself should be short and address just one single thing - a though, a topic. Maybe like a single column in a row of a database? The collection of notes can be strung together, in different order to create a single thought. One note can be used in different collections. So, a collection would be a single, more complex idea that is made up of a collection of notes.

And how do you manage these notes? By default, chronologically. But also by tag, by topic, etc. Whatever it is you are trying to express, it becomes a linked list of notes. For now, I manage by ELK or opensearch and a nosql database. Notes are easy. Collections and thoughs and streams of consciousness are more complex and varied.

Have questions or want to share your own expat story? Leave a comment below!

(I will set up comments eventually ;)