We started Overtime last year bemoaning the lack of social eSports being played in New Zealand, not fully understanding the reason behind that absence. Well, now we do. It’s really hard to do it properly. It takes a bunch of time, coordination, and passion. Fortunately we still have the passion, but unfortunately, our time has dried up. We won’t be running Season 2 this year. Instead, Troy and I will be spinning off the software we wrote to manage the first season, and working on that to the point where it’s a viable product in and of itself. Our new tournament as a service will be called BattleStack - and we’re very excited to be working on it. ...

So it struck me that the more I reflect and refine the thoughts I have on the speakers at Webstock 2016, the more I want to write it down somewhere. Alcoholism will eventually take my brain, so it would serve me well to log down my thoughts. It’s also good practice for building opinions and learning how to communicate better. Heather Armstrong, for those who do not know, is internet famous. I didn’t know that. I’m not her target market and of course, that’s okay. But what is she doing at webstock? ...

Over the last few days, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking. Thinking about what, and why should you care? I’m not sure I know the answer to those questions any more. What I do know, is that I want to go back to webstock next year, regardless of whatever else is going on in my life at the time. These words are coming out like treacle right now, I don’t usually have a problem communicating like this. ...

Overtime New Zealand is a social video game league for corporates. Companies get together and play games against each other for bragging rights, e-peen and other critically important reasons, like proving that you’re better at Dota 2 then X_MAIN_RIVAL_FIRM. So without Further ado, here’s what we’re running at the moment. I’ll go through our components technology by technology: Most importantly, Docker We couldn’t do what we wanted to do with Overtime’s CI / CD without docker. Initially I created docker-compose containers for instances of Docker Registry, Nginx, and MongoDB and our Web App. The plan was to containerise those components because it would allow us to scale up instances of our web app and MongoDB in case our load got crazy high. An ambitious design requirement, but much better for the long run. In fact nearly every design decision we’ve made technologically has been focused on “What will make our lives easier in the long term”. We do this voluntarily so making money immediately and as quickly as possible isn’t such a huge issue for us! It’s nice. ...

It’s been a while between posts. Here’s Why: I’ve been on holiday for two weeks! It’s been pretty good. I spent a week in Ohakune, in the central Plateau of the North Island of Naw Zealand and another week in Russell, much further north. It was awesome to get away from Auckland, but I’m ready to go home. I have spent my time organising my reading list for the upcoming year (scheduled for reading are gems such as Code Complete, Continuous Delivery, The Fundamentals of Security and The Mythical Man Month). I’m excited, I’ve got about 60 books lined up for the year and I can’t wait to get stuck in. ...

Oh the times, they are a changin' The past month has been crazy. In the past month, I’ve started a new role, my son has started crawling, I’ve helped launch the second season of Overtime on a brand new technical stack, they only thing that hasn’t changed is this blog, I’ve been neglecting it. Work has slowed down a bit before christmas, so now seems like a good time to post an update. ...

The work that I’ve been doing for the past few months has been pretty interesting. At the moment it takes developers working on one of our ventures about an hour and a half to two hours to deploy code to a test or prod machine. It used to take a second venture a similar amount of time to do the same task, but the process we’ve implemented for them has reduced that significantly. Once the process is completed across both ventures, our team will have reduced that deployment time enough, that the product owners for those ventures will effectively gain 20% more points for work per sprint. ...

Thoughts on Design. I’m losing faith in the design of my website. It looks dated. I’m not really sure what to do with it other then give it an overhaul. But that requires coming up with a new look and feel. It requires implementing that. But muh effort, Muh time constraints and other such excuses of the weak willed. I’m going to learn about design. Rather then just minimally modifying a template, I’m going to look at every piece of this website and give it some love and attention. It’s been quite neglected. ...

In hindsight I feel like I focussed more on the soft skills needed to get an internship and how to actually go about it, so this time I’ll provide a bit of insight into the actual technical skills that I feel you need (or I need, at least I need while I’m here at Spark) Let’s be clear right at the start, I have used maybe 15% ~ 20% at best, of the knowledge I learned at University. Most surprising of all is that most of what I have used, came from a stage one course. Yeah that course in HTML that everybody turns their noses up at because it’s for plebians who can’t into C? Take it. You’ll earn dollars with that course. ...

This is an article I wrote for Spark Ventures I’m currently Interning for them) on how I got my internship, and how others can break into the IT Industry. My writing style still isn’t great, so it was good to be given an excuse to practice! ================================= I have loved technology ever since I was a wee nipper. I confused a lot of people when I joined the Army after college but that decision was key (more on that another time though). I left the Army in time to enroll in Semester Two 2013 at the University of Auckland. I sit here now, on the top floor of Spark City in Auckland, and I feel very, very fortunate. ...