May, June and July recap

3-in-1 Box set edition

Today a good friend(?) of mine came with the snarky comment above, and of course put his finger at a sore point. It’s an easy thing to forget to do, but I really like these retrospectives. So, I should properly try to catch up.

Leaving a client

The last couple (or three) months have been a bit different than normal for me. At the end of April, I told my client at the time that I planned on leaving them with the end of June. At that point, I would almost have been at them for two years, so it was time for me to move on. It has been a blast working at LEGO, I got out of my comfort zone and learned a lot of new technologies (NodeJS, AWS-everything), got to know a lot of fantastic people that I hope to keep in touch with and I also think I taught them a thing or two both about development and teamwork. I hope to work with them again in the future.

Finding a new

I hoped I would be able to find a new client before the summer holiday because I had a lot of time. But often the freelance jobs are only available with a very short notice. If you are available in two months there are almost no opening, but if you say two days everything is possible.

In the first week of July I ended up talking with a lot of different people about a lot of different jobs and I ended up choosing a task a little closer to my natural comfort zone. I’m going to write .net again, and this time hosted in Azure. I think it’s going to be great, and I plan to write about it for the rest of the year.

Vacation time

For the most of July I was on holiday, and luckily, we had planned to spend a couple of weeks in Greece. Otherwise I would have been a very cold, wet and sad summer. The positive thing regarding the weather was that I very seldom was tempted to go outside, so instead I spend some time at the front of my computer (I know that may be shocking!). I spend a little time converting Marias website to ASP.Net Core and it was very nice to work with. A lot better than the “old” MVC and I like the built-in bower support and general support of front end technologies.

Static web sites

Unfortunately, it still feels like a bit heavy for a static website with a mail sign up form. I also would like to separate the content more form the markup. Therefor (and also because I’m only 3 years behind the curve) I started looking into static web site generators and tried to set a site up in Hugo. I’m very impressed and I even got a simple JavaScript pipeline up and running without any issues.

I think Hugo as website and Azure Functions for backend stuff could be a recipe for success. First I will try to move my own site into HUGO and see how it works before I break my wife’s site 😉

August will be a bit of a hectic month, but hopefully I will be able to make a recap of it before November…

Michael Skarum avatar
About Michael Skarum
I'm Michael Skarum, an independent software developer, architect and consultant.