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.

The Team would like to thank everyone who had input into Season 1, and our pre-season. Thank you to our sponsors, our game admins and the teams, you, our players. In particular, we want to thank the great folk at Bigpipe and Playtech. Without your support, our LAN Final would never have happened. Your support is what made it all work.

Thank you.

The awesomeness that was Season 1 is a perfect example of what all you likeminded people can do when you come together. We aim to make that ‘coming together’ scale.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Alex

team@battlestack.io

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.

The Christie Marceau Charitable Trust

I’ve also spent a good deal of time helping out with the trust. The woman who runs it is a good friend of my mother in law. The trust needed a refresh of their website and to consolidate the digital presence they had.

They were paying $300 a year for a bunch of services they didn’t need (part of the package they had gave them 50 databases! 50 databases and one website

• what a hilarious way of making it seem like your product represents value for money to those who don’t know any better. Honestly the state of web hosting in New Zealand makes me feel angry. So many people who don’t know better are getting fleeced by these companies who, at the end of the day, provide a poor service simply because competition in NZ is so abysmal).

/rant

Anyway, I rewrote the trust website into an angular site with a bunch of content, realised it was as ugly as sin and enlisted the help of a talented designer named Walt. He helped me out with the design, I cancelled the trust’s old web services package and the new setup is super simple. I ditched Angular, hosted the page on github pages (TY GITHUB) and now the trust only needs to pay for the domain name every 2 years. It’s a solution much better suited to the actual needs of the trust and I’m glad to have been able to tailor a solution for them. It’s a timely reminder that what is simple for people in the tech industry often isn’t for people outside the industry. A timely reminder for me to stay humble and focus on how I can help people rather than how I can make as much cash as quickly as possible and screw the needs of the person I’m representing (looking at you Free Parking ಠ_ಠ). The new website is fairly basic at the moment but it’s functional and thanks to Walt, it look good. I’ll expand on it content wise throughout the year, I hope to post fairly regular updates on it though that will depend on the trust having news to share!

Overtime Tech Talk

I’ve taken some time out to draft a post and presentation on Overtime and how exactly our technology fits together, it’s still in the works but for those that care, I haven’t forgotten! I promise!

That’s it for now, time to hit the beach!

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.

Leaving Spark Ventures

I left Spark Ventures after working there for a year. They supported me in the first full time role as a software developer that I’ve ever had, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunities they gave me, and I’ll miss the team and the work. I left on great terms and (if it’s in the cards) I look forward to returning in a more senior role. Before I left, my team was working on continuous integration and deployment. We successfully transitioned Bigpipe from a completely manual deployment process to an automatic one. It was a really enjoyable task, and once it was complete, I wanted to keep doing that kind of work.

Enter Healthlink, stage left.

I was made aware of an opportunity at Healthlink to continue doing work like the work I did for Bigpipe. The situation here at healthlink makes the Bigpipe automation simple! Healthlink runs a product that enables health practitioners to send documents - referrals, letters, medical certificates, test results and so on - digitally between providers. It’s the reason that you can get a non-funded drug approved by Pharmac in three days rather than three weeks. It’s behind your rural doctor getting results back from that specialist lab in the big city as soon as the results are done - without having to wait for the rural post service to deliver the mail.

It’s an complex system of java applications, web servers, auth servers, databases and APIs that have got loads of tightly coupled moving parts. I’m helping them work through that system with a view to achieving CI/CD - completing this process will hopefully reduce the degree of coupling, consolidate technologies and generally refresh the tech too. It’s the biggest job I’ve ever attempted, and I’m glad that I’ll be working alongside some incredibly clever people - all of whom will be able to teach me a great deal.

Overtime Season 2

Overtime season 2 has launched!

We’ve completely rebuilt out tech stack! There’ll be another post coming with the specifics on what we did and how we did it, as well as some challenges we had to overcome. We’re looking at returning to the NZ eSports scene bigger and better then ever before, and I think we’ll start to see some traction this season. We’re more organised, more experienced and have better technologies behind us. The team is expanding - more people working on more things mean we can just do.. more!

Watch that space, season 2 is going to be excellent!

Toby has started crawling!

I’m pretty proud of that little guy. He’s ahead of schedule for all of his developmental milestones, he was born on the wrong end of the scales for average head size, body size, body weight and a bunch of other stuff. At 8 months old, he’s now in the 97th percentile for head size (aka big ol’ brain) and is above the average for his other growth indicators. My wife is doing a great job being a mum while I have to leave for work every day. I’m very proud of them both.

Things are looking pretty positive.

I’m in the proess of writing a whole bunch of posts, and will be hopefully publishing a bit over christmas. TTYL. Beer to drink.

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.

I hope to populate this blog with revision notes from my classes, once classes start back up, as well as passing comment on anything and everything, as and when I see fit.

This is the first post so I will end it here, with this sweet picture of a a place near and dear to my heart.

Gulp is what I’m using for builds, the output of gulp’s build process is piped into a folder that I’ve set up as a nested github profile. BrowserSync handles all of my testing and content iteration, it’s amazing. To get a post onto the live site or make some other change, all I have to do it write it up, check it looks right using BrowserSync and then git commit -am "Of course with a sweet commit message" from my prod folder. Yes there are extra steps that I’ve introduced, but that allows me to make big changes with multiple commits, iterate and push to test as much as I like, without the risk of omnishambling my live site. It’s pretty cool.

Technical things aside, my boy Toby is nearly 5 months old. Time flies. I’m working full time at Ventures, it’s awesome. Super glad that I did the Summer of Tech programme when I did, else I’d still be working at the liquor store. That would be a grim existence indeed.

I am technically still at Uni. The longer I work in the tech industry though, the less relevant Uni becomes and thus the more difficult it becomes to stay engaged in my studies - especially when still no course I’ve done past CS111G has actually been useful for work. It’s maddening.

It could be a lot worse though, my amazing son and beautiful wife are keeping me honest, in an industry I love. First World Problems indeed

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)

We got results back from his umbilical cord and placenta analysis - turns out there was a blood clot in the cord. I imagine if the docs new that, he would have been whipped out via c-section the second we presented to the hospital. He should have been stillborn, all things considered, Laura could have died if a part of the clot broke off and got into her system. Fucking unreal. We’re very lucky. Miraculously so. The odds were super against us.

Which is why now, more then ever, I’m motivated to ignore a lot of baggage and more than a little bit of fear, in order to crack on and get stuck with big needles. Because people need blood, my wife and child nearly did, others sure as hell do. During her hospital stay she wasn’t the sickest person on the ward, nor was Toby.

Shit’s important yo. Go donate. Each donation could save the lives of 3 people. What’s a bit of fear and discomfort compared with the lives of 3 people?

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’ve been doing what I can to get to uni and lectures, but frankly I haven’t been very successful in that regard. I’m handing in assignments on time and have passed all my tests and stuff so far, so it’s not an unsalvageable semester, but it is a very tight wire that i’m walking on. With luck and effort I’ll do well, but the more I attend uni, the less I feel like it’s actually helping me.

I’m still working at Spark Ventures, I’m also involved with Summer of Tech this year. Both are awesome opportunities for me in regards to career prospects.

The flipside of having a child now is that I’ll be seeking full time work in, around or slightly before August. I’m undecided if I’ll stay with Spark or if I’ll throw in with Summer of Tech, either options are really good.

Thats why Uni is such a conundrum for me. I want to get as much done as I can before that August cut off, but by the same token, I’ve got a job, every week of full time uni over full time work represents significant loss of earnings for me, at a time where I want to be earning as much for my boy as I can.

Compounding that is the fact that I feel like I’ve lost the faith with the CS department here. The stuff I’m learning right now just doesn’t feel relevant, the most useful paper I’ve done so far at Uni is still a stage 1 paper that taught basic html and css. I can’t help but feel like the purpose of going to uni was to get a job, and now that I’ve done that, why am I still giving these people money for what is essentially learnings that are irrelevant at best and outdated at worst.

I don’t know.

I’ve got some stuff to work through I think. I’ll be glad to see the end of full time study later this year. Of course once I start working full time, I’ll study part time and get my degree done eventually. But is there any reason to let it weigh on my mind and my time as heavily as it does right now?

I don’t know. I guess time will tell.

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.

I’ve made notes on my github projects reflecting the current status of the projects. Hopefully I can get back to them at some stage. Funnily enough there is a lot of work preparing to have a first child with three weeks notice. Again, once things settle down I hope to get back to those projects.

I want to thank everybody who reads this. I’ve had a pretty steady amount of visitors, almost 600 per month for the past months. It means a lot to me that people are reading, and hopefully enjoying what I have written, even if my original intention was to use this solely for revision purposes.

I will attempt to post whenever I can, time and content permitting.

Cheers

Alex