I’m finally starting to settle into staying in another country. Leeds is a pretty great city and I’m in love with the most awesome running route. Still getting used to it being light at 22:00 though.

Bank project

Slow and steady has been the name of the game here. I’ve been researching a few issues around the implementation of a distributed model. I’ve also been in touch with a few people in the banking sector who will undoubtedly bring some great insight to the project.

I’m really looking forward to getting to the harder stuff.

Low level

I come from a self-taught background as a developer. I started with the front end basics and pretty much worked my way backwards over the last decade+. Over the last week I’ve started working through some material which is giving me insight into the inner workings of programs. I’m talking about stepping through C programs using gdb, inspecting memory addresses, working through and understanding the dissassembly. I’m loving it. I’ve done a little HLA (Higher Level Assembly) way back when but it’s good to be able to understand programs at this level.

Monitoring

For a while I’ve been looking for a nice and simple monitoring tool for my servers, something that looks at a list of processes and if one of them stops it lets me know. I built that program and called it go monitor. It works really well and I’m stoked on it. I also managed to do it in a few hours, another reason I love Go. I wrote a post on it.

Misc

• Added more books to an ever expanding “to read” list
• Looking forward to the GopherCon videos
• Finding some really cool bands through Spotify
• Listening to The Tao of Seneca. Great so far.
• Continually disappointed by moves on the SA government
• Lightly following UK politics, and realising the SA government isn’t actually that far off

Conclusion

Another good week-ish gone by. Upcoming highlights include (hopefully) some dev time on the banking project, learning more about crypto and security, and more running and gym.