Last week in Followsound 2021.1


The week began with a continuation, and worsening of my sickness; headaches, tiredness, sinus pain, aching joints and muscles, runny nose, chesty cough, to name a few.

Getting back into the swing of things at work was also a little difficult, as I’ve had almost three weeks off over the holiday break. However, the new year’s joy is present, and we are planning many good things for our team. The general gist is: More lightweight time-tracking, meaning that we don’t need to record time in many places; Ensuring we are sharing knowledge across the team, and the wider company effectively; Ensure we are providing an actual service, rather than just a collection of random Open Source tools that we happen to support; Push more exploratory work into the pipeline, ensuring we are at the forefront of our technology radar.

How many of these we can implement is up for cynic in me to ponder.

Things I’ve worked on in the week: Tidy up actions for an important project milestone; Lots of Terraform code; Too many merge requests to count; Implementing cross-account secret sharing in AWS; Many updates to technical documentation.


For HucklowNet I have been working on a new monitoring platform, which I have a draft post brewing to provide more detail. The system is composed of Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Grafana, all running on K3s - isn’t everything nowadays!

HucklowNet currently has a customer whose fibre is not working correctly, so I worked with a colleague to get a proper test plan in place. Something we have wanted to do for a while.

We managed to run through all the tests, but found no issues, mostly because we don’t have a good baseline for each fibre connection. So more work is needed here, a post about it for detail would be good.


I had a long discussion with an acquaintance on the impact of the pandemic, which is as bad as it could get losing their job, struggling with bills, pressure on relationships, the works! It made me realise how lucky people are to still be in employment, and how we mustn’t lose sight of the issues. I hate to say people are “lucky” to be in employment. This is what keeps bringing me back to the idea of UBI, but that is another post.

In happier news, I’ve managed to order the car I want, finally. I’m going electric, and am so excited. Just have to wait for 11-15 weeks, so should be mid-to-late spring when I receive it. Hopefully, we will be more vaccinated by then, so I can actually travel in it!

Speaking of vaccinations, anyone in my family over 70 years old has now been vaccinated or has an appointment booked; such good news! I hope the vaccine has the effectiveness promised, so we can at least see our older loved ones with much less risk.

I know next week will be challenging work-wise, I’m still working on last week’s issues, so I’ve been eating and sleeping well this weekend to ensure I can get next week out the way with confidence.