Personal-Update

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

This now constitutes v3.0 of my personal website and sounding board. It’s been a long journey from some bloated and slow bootstrap template that I picked up and cannibalised, to a bespoke website written in Pure CSS with a Wordpress Blog component - to the current (as at 25 Aug 15) iteration. Currently the site is hosted off github pages. It’s Jekyll with Foundation 5 at the core, I’m using markdown and liquid to handle blog posts. ...

I’m donating blood today. It’ll be my 20th donation. Probably around 4 were whole blood, another 6 were plasma, the remaining 10 being apheresis aka platelet donations. I’m O- so my blood is quite useful, it can be given to anyone. Mostly it goes to newborns. That’s always been a pretty cool thing for me, but when my own little one was born it made things quite a bit more important. Tobias was born premature due to a rare condition my wife had. He narrowly avoided the neo-natal intensive care unit (a few days earlier or a few tens of grams less and he would have gotten a sweet incubator) ...

On Thursday my son, Tobias, will be one month old. The days are getting longer but the weeks are getting shorter! I’ve been neglecting this platform, but haven’t forgotten about it. At Uni, exams times are approaching, I’ll be posting all of my revision notes on the blog - to keep me honest and keep everything searchable. In the time between posts I’ve been crazy busy. Juggling Uni with work and having a son, while still doing pet projects for my own learning. A while back a few friends and I started something called overtime, It’s a very exciting project - www.overtime.nz. I also joined an ARMA 3 Clan called SOCOMD, I’m rewriting the website and blog they use on my own time, and they’re very pleased with what I’ve done so far. Check it out at www.socomd.azurewebsites.net. Another very cool project. ...

I have been offline for a long long time. Here’s the situation. Last Friday, my wife Laura and I found out she is 34 weeks pregnant with a potentially life threatening complication, forcing her to remain in Hospital. We have been overwhelmed with the generosity of our family and friends, we are truly grateful for all the love and support we have received thus far. I have been meaning to write up all my notes and use this blog for revision. I still intend to do that. I have been attending lectures but unfortunately am so time poor apart from that, that I have loads of text files that need formatting, media added and additional detail before I can upload them here. I still intend to do that, but it will take time I don’t have now. Hopefully I can fully catch up during the mid semester break. ...