02/20/2025 - Another Day Another Dollar

Today's Rating: 6/10

Song of the Day: Small Talk - Briston Maroney

Current Book: Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Day 4!

Today's post will be a bit shorter. I typically try to write these posts early in the morning before logging onto work for the day. This morning I happened to sleep in right up until the time I typically log onto work (7 CST/8 EST), so I need to rush this one out.

Yesterday was a very normal day for me save a few differences. I woke up around the normal time, created yesterday's blog post, and got to work immediately. I had to do some prep work for yesterday evening's maintenance (unfortunately, these are pretty regular: I had two this week and two planned for next week). I completed the prep work quickly and started on my one of my larger tasks for the new sprint. Without getting too into the weeds, one of our clients requested "immutable artifacts" for their deployments meaning they only had to build their app images once and could promote them through the environments at their discretion. Honestly, I prefer this approach over the default implementation we have for other clients (where we use an environmental branching strategy and promote changes up branch in Github triggering rebuilds each time).

Here's a brief article with more about the topic if you are curious: Using Semver for Docker Image Tags.

I created the necessary configurations and documentation for tenants to implement this and am now just waiting to hear back from them when they are ready to implement it. I had my daily standup at 11 and went on my typical walk right after. In total, I walked 3.33 miles in 67 minutes.

The rest of the day was spent on a couple of service tickets. I find that many of the tickets we get are due to fundamental misunderstandings of the platform probably caused by turnover/lack of hand offs in the client project teams. I also know most people hate reading documentation and would rather just ping someone for a quick answer.

After work, I did my monthly financial review. I get paid semi-monthly on the 7th and 22nd of each month, but since I bank with Capital One, I typically get my paycheck a couple of days early. On the day that I receive my last paycheck of the month, I do two things that I call: "account balance" and "account lookover". For the account balance, I essentially look at the amount of money in my checking account and any upcoming expenses for the month and make sure there is enough in there to cover them all. If not, I will pull some money from savings to buffer my checking account. I also use it as an opportunity to be aware of the cash flow in my life and update the budget accordingly. After completing that, I do my "account lookover" where I log into my various financial accounts (bank, brokerage, 401(k), etc...) and record the balances on my asset tracker spreadsheet. This helps me to stay motivated in my savings and investments as I see these numbers grow.

After the financials were out of the way, I started on Season 3 of Invincible. I was oblivious to the fact that the show had released new episodes until my wife told me about it. She left to get dinner at the single most overrated restaurant in the entire town of Alexandria (I'd say world but I can be a bit dramatic). I watched two or three episodes while she was gone and ate my dinner (frozen Jambalaya). Dinner was surprisingly good, but I'm still having sensitivity in my teeth so I have to chew with my front two like this:

After dinner, I got ready for maintenance. Maintenance went smooth, and I was done in ~35 minutes. Since Maddie was not home, I didn't feel the need to immediately log off work and decided to take a look into a script that was broken that makes maintenance harder than it needs to be (we rely on this script to automate some of the tasks we do for maintenance; when it breaks, we have to do these manually). I ended up finding the issue and submitted a PR to get it fixed that I'm hoping will be reviewed in the morning.

Maddie got home, and we finished the last episode of "Keith Eats the Menu - Cheesecake Factory". I was rather tired at this point so only read a few pages of my book before calling it a night.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!