Archive

I've been working on two important things aside from client work: a.) updates to my website and b.) updates to the Pulumi desktop app. I'll write about the website updates in a separate post but I wanted to take the time to dive into what it's been like adding a new feature to Pulumi desktop app.

Pulumi Desktop App Update

I've been working on adding a feature that allows users to group projects. I've learned quite a lot from working on this feature. The entire experience of having to develop a cross-platform desktop app has been a great learning experience. But this single feature has taught me a lot about user experience and time and the compromises we have to make to strike a fine balance.

In all I've spent about three days' worth of engineering time on this and I am getting close to releasing it very soon.

We are well into our second quarter for this year and I haven’t done a retrospective of how the first quarter went. It’s time I took care of that. The first quarter was the busiest that I had ever been, since I went independent last year.

One Year Completion

One year of hustle to find continuous work. One year of health insurance, 0 company holidays, 0 bonuses. It’s been worth it. I crossed the one year mark on 2/1/2023. During 2022 I did a lot of foundational work to set myself up for this year. So far I think it’s been paying off (not literally though…at least not yet I hope.) Each year of planning and execution is so that the business can survive the following year.

First International Client

I know I know, we’re in 2023 already. But I wanted to close out the weeknotes for 2022.

I know I haven’t been following the weekly pattern for writing these but the last two weekends were a bit of a blur. I was able to enjoy the good weather and go out for long motorcycle rides out to the Olympic Peninsula. But I am glad to be sitting down and writing this today. Looking back at the past few weeks, a lot has happened.

License and Registration Please

No, not the one you are thinking of. It’s my business license and registration with the WA Department of Revenue (DOR). I had registered a sole-proprietorship initially but quickly realized that if I am going to do what I am doing full-time, I need to register an LLC. So I registered an LLC earlier this year. My sole proprietorship registration was coming up for renewal and I was going to let it lapse since I didn’t need it anymore and I wasn’t doing business under that ownership type anymore. Well, when I called the DOR they drew my attention to the Unified Business Identifier (UBI) that was printed on the certificate of formation they issued for my LLC. 🤦‍♂️ I had completely missed that. I scrambled to submit a registration for that with the DOR. Once I registered it I was then directed to file an excise tax return for the business for the last 8 months! I panicked to be honest. I was able to get them to waive the penalty on one of the returns but it seems they rejected my appeal on another one. Bummer!

I couldn’t help but think that the state could have just said: “hey, by the way, you’ll need to file an excise tax return for this newly formed LLC regardless of whether or not you have any business, so we went ahead and created the new DOR registration for you. Here you go. You’re welcome.”

The first week of August was mostly typical client work. In the previous weeknote I mentioned that I had started a month-long trial with a startup. It was a trial because we wanted to see how well it worked out for both of us. As of 8/1, I was able to secure a 3-month engagement(!) which continues the same type of engagement.

During the second week I attended DefCon 30! This was my first time ever at DefCon. I attended talks in the Cloud Village mostly but also got to watch some exploit demos in the main DefCon track as well. I made a few new connections and met an old colleague from Pulumi as well! I am looking forward to developing a relationship with the new folks I met and try to open up new opportunities for Cloudy Sky Software.

Disclaimer: The following are a few memorable talks from the conference. These are highly summarized and as such do not reflect the entire material contained within those talks. I’ve attempted to highlight my key takeaways. The actual talks offer more information.

Note: I have changed the titles of the talks from their original title for the purposes of this newsletter.

👋 It’s been a while since I wrote weeknotes.

New Customer Conversations

I’ve been able to get a new client on a trial basis. I am working with them as a consultant in the truest sense, that is, they are consulting me for my Pulumi expertise via Slack. It’s a good model for teams that have the capacity to implement Pulumi themselves but don’t have the years of experience that I have. I can help unblock them if they get into a bind with their Pulumi implementation. I’ve also had conversations to be a fractional CTO for a SaaS product.

Helping Neural Payments Move Real Dollars

Making Moves

One of the goals for my business is to help with Pulumi adoption. Call me biased but I truly believe in the technology and think it has done wonders for the cloud engineering world. I had an opportunity to partner with Pulumi's Customer Experience team and have dedicated some time to exclusively work with their clients. Along with that I have been contacting small_ish_ teams about their cloud infrastructure needs and have been having some initial conversations.

Taking A Day Off

I am finally at a point where I am comfortable taking a day off that is not just the weekend. Just one day for now. I've worked 22 weeks straight since my last day at Pulumi. Being out on my own, and having to run a business means I don't get a day off, I have to take it. There are no paid company holidays.

This week I was...

• Cleaning up a client's git branching strategy
• Contributed a tiny change to Tailscale
• Implement a persistent session store for an Express.js and other miscellaneous UI work
• Switch a Kubernetes cluster from using spot to reserved VMs
• Announced my business on LinkedIn! Also you should totally follow our company page.

Git Workflow

The client wanted to switch to GitHub and do automated deploys. When I checked out their repo, I discovered that they had several active branches and the main branch hadn't been updated in over 6 months. That's not a good sign. So I started digging into the active branches and figured out what was going on. Then I put together a plan of action to get all of their branches in working order and establish a new git workflow that is more streamlined. Basically, make develop the default branch and always forward merge to main after they verify the automated deployment from the develop branch. I won't go too much into the details of the specifics about the app itself. But this setup works best for them given how their app releases are made.