Excited to join instil.io as Staff Software Engineer! 🎉

Ended my journey as Staff Software Engineer at Charles Schwab!

I've started revisiting interview code challenges to clean up and complete them. The most recent one I had to do was a least recently used cache. As is basically always the case, I hadn't built one of these since college, except for occasional interview assignments. So I had forgotten the specifics of how it's done, in an algorithmically optimal way. I fumbled through it and came to what is roughly the correct solution, although due to time pressure and artificial constraints I made some choices that were less than optimal. I cleaned that up and fixed the poor choices, including writing unit tests for 100% coverage. This took about 90 extra minutes. We'll see how it goes, but I plan to keep doing this for future coding challenges. If nothing else, it could be something to talk about in those future interviews.
https://github.com/jenniferplusplus/Interview-algorithms/tree/main/LeastRecentCache.Generic

I wrote a blog post about better interviewing practices for software engineers. I've been interviewing actively for a few months, so it's a topic I've become deeply frustrated with. The reason it's taken months is also pretty frustrating, but I think those are stories for another time.
https://jenniferplusplus.com/interviewing-engineers/

I had a bit of time and energy, so I revisited that Ansible project. And I actually made some progress. I think Ansible is just failing to parse IPv6 addresses from an inventory file? At least that's my best guess. I reconfigured the target so I can use IPv4 for now, and that worked. And I guess that's fine. In "prod" (as it were) I would be targeting a URL anyway, rather than a raw IP address.

I'm working on encapsulating my personal infra (such as it is) with Infrastructure as Code tools. I'm a simple girl with little more than a blog, so that's basically just a small number of app servers behind an Nginx reverse proxy and their associated databases. I don't have any scaling concerns, so no real need to orchestrate things. This just makes maintaining and updating long lived servers easier. I'm trying to keep things on the cattle end of the cattle-pets-babies infra spectrum. Anyway, tool of choice for this scenario is Ansible.

And I'm trying to finish before my service renews in August so I can easily update to newer machines. 🤞🏻