Week Notes 2024#4

Evergreen

Created: 2024-11-03 Updated: 2024-11-03

It's been quite a while...

It has been about 3 months since I started a new job at ServiceNow as a Senior Systems Engineer. My new team has been kind and welcoming. My previous job had very high stress and frustration levels, and it has been much needed departure from this as ServiceNow. I feel like I have had plenty of time to ease into the company, team, and projects. So far, I am working on:
A monitoring script for Kafka.
An API rewrite/modernization with Python and FastAPI
After getting my offer, I took a couple weeks off. My wife and I went to Hawaii (again!), which was a wonderful way to decompress from the old job, and the job hunt, before starting up at ServiceNow.
All deeplearning.ai projects have been put on hold, while they sort out what they actually want to accomplish. This is a bit frustrating, as I put in quite a lot of effort on the PDF benchmarker project. I've been trying to look at the silver lining. It was my first time working on open source, I met great people that have become part of my network, and I'm less intimidated about open source now. I need to find a new open source project to contribute to.

Watched

I'm currently listening to the audiobook of Tana French's "In the Woods", a murder mystery.
Slowly making my way through The Book of Elsewhere, by Keanu Reeves and China Mieville. It was initially difficult to get into, but I'm starting to pick up steam.
Finished rereading the entire Wheel of Time series about a month ago, by listening to the audiobooks. The narrators were quite good. I read them starting as a young teenager, and it was entertaining and moving to read them again as an adult.
Read the Scholomance trilogy this year, by Naomi Novik.
Read the first couple books of the Temeraire series, also by Naomi Novik.