I’ve recently been in the position of having time off over the summer by virtue of handing in resignation and deciding to take a break; it ended up being about 6 weeks. I recently got accepted for a new position and my experience of the exit and subequently onboarding process led to some introspection around how much first and last impressions matter for a company.

One common pattern I see in not-quite-yet-senior developers is that they don’t necessarily recognize the moments when there is more than one option. This happens all the time in programming; you are constantly making decisions and committing to particular solutions. If you are not aware of the choices you are making - you are picking the first idea that comes to mind (or the first stackoverflow answer) then there’s a good chance you are choosing poorly.

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, we should all be getting a lot of time for introspection and examination. This was going to be a post about the changes I needed to make to git-flow so that we can support the changes that github decided on around default branch naming in git. It veered off on a tangent pretty quickly because I didn’t need to do anything with git-flow. The original script writer decided that master, production, and main were all valid trunk branch names for the default behaviour, so now we have git-flow enabled with main+develop and older repositories with master+develop. I suspect this isn’t by coincidence.

I’m now at the stage of my life where I have accrued some measure of experience and marginal success (insert the appropriate Liam Neeson quote here). I’m also quite expensive, because I’m a middle aged man that’s been on some career trajectory; yet at some level I’m viewed as being interchangeable with some other anonymous developer. This has got me thinking as to whether that’s really the case or whether like most things, it’s that way because that’s the easy way out.

Since the whole work from home thing has started; there have been a couple of changes that I’ve noticed. First of all: I used to be able to use Teams on my personal hardware; but now I can’t because they’re not managed by the company. This has had the sad side effect of forcing me to consistently use my corporate laptop because I can’t use my personal hardware with Teams; sure I can use the web based version of teams, but Edge/Chrome on Windows can’t seem to use my bluetooth headset properly (it works fine with the skype windows app) which I suspect is because the context switch from high def sound to low-def sound so we have the bandwidth to use both speaker + mic is what’s confusing the browser (web skype test call takes ages to funnel sound to the headset).

This post isn’t about the that, it’s about gradle which I have some control over. What I’ve noticed is that intermittently my gradle builds fail with Read timed out issues; this made me think that our external facing artefact repo was having issues, until I realised that it absolutely never happened when I wasn’t on the Mac.