I have been working professionally for close to 10 years in seven companies (not counting part-time job or internships). Disclaimer: I am no workplace expert. I am an average cog in the wheel who reads and thinks a lot on the subject (and perhaps have been through a few of the not so great workplaces myself). This might or might not be a writing therapy reflecting on my worklife over the years and most recently.

Companies who could afford in-house engineering teams often have tendencies to build custom in-house solutions no matter how prevalent that solution already is. To highlight the absurdity, let me give an example: Jupyter Notebook. Despite the space being extremely competitive, Google has Colab, Amazon has Sagemaker, Azure, Databricks, Domino, Binder all offer similar services and the list goes on, Product or Technology still cannot resist the urge to build one (if not multiple) in-house.

About two days ago, one of my coworkers was so fed up by Jenkins and decided to try Github Action. I’ve been thinking about automating publishing this github site since … the day I set it up. At work, if I have to setup a CD pipeline, I’d usually put it on Jenkins. But at home, I just want to sit back and relax, I don’t want to spend my Netflix time fixing Jenkins (which unfortunately it breaks all the time at work).

I use this little github site to host my jupyter notebook for machine learning projects I’ve done and some toy examples of doing cool visualization with d3 with notebook and python. I’ve been using jekyll for years but I finally got to a point where - I rarely maintain this site and because jekyll is such a flexible and extendable library, everytime I try to update something it’s becoming difficult to navigate, I pulled the trigger to move to hugo recently.