What I learned at Webstock 2016

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....

February 13, 2016 · 7 min · Alex

Overtime's Tech Stack

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....

January 14, 2016 · 4 min · Alex

New Year Update

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)....

January 8, 2016 · 3 min · Alex

Change

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....

December 18, 2015 · 3 min · Alex

Continuous Delivery

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....

October 28, 2015 · 3 min · Alex

Design and Content

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....

October 19, 2015 · 2 min · Alex

The Internship Experience Part II

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....

October 10, 2015 · 5 min · Alex

The Internship Experience

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)....

October 9, 2015 · 5 min · Alex

The Inaugural Blog Post

Hi there, My name is Alex. I’ve no idea if anybody will read this, it’s more for my own sanity anyway so that’s fine! I’m a student at the University of Auckland, currently working over summer as an intern for Spark Ventures. I’m loving being back in a real job. Don’t get me wrong, University is great, but the amount of time I wasted every day sleeping in until 11am because I didn’t have class until noon, was ridiculous....

October 8, 2015 · 1 min · Alex

Summer of Tech Meet and Greet

Next week on Tuesday, the Summer of Tech Meet and Greet will be going down range. I’m looking forward to it! It’s going to be interesting to be attending this year’s meet and greet on the other side of the fence. Last year I attended as a prospective intern, it was a loud, chaotic and hectic environment. I feel like it suited me well! This time I’m going to be looking at it from the Employer perspective....

September 7, 2015 · 3 min · Alex