This is the last Blaugust Promptapalooza post for this year! It’s my first one, and I really feel badly that I missed all the previous ones.
I loved some of the prompts, didn’t like some of the others, and there were some I just couldn’t think of anything to say. I learned a lot from reading others’ posts and met some new friends — yeah, I know that’s cliche, but even cliches can be true.
The final writing prompt of Promptapalooza 2020 is from the prompt master himself, who surprisingly didn’t (yet) write a post asking the question:
What is your favorite thing to do in order to relax?
Well, I don’t know but… I play video games to relax. Also, I watch movies, work on 3D printing, play tabletop games, bicycle, play my flutes and kalimbas, write — pretty much every post in this blog is a story of me relaxing.
I don’t talk about work much because I doubt anyone would be interested, and I’m not about to invade the personal privacy of the people I work with to talk about them on a blog. Plus, since I work for a company that is involved in financial matters, I literally can’t talk in any sort of detail about exactly what it is I do. Aside from: I’m a web developer working primarily at the moment in writing back-end services for an Angular/Bootstrap application. (Yes, I linked to Bootstrap 3 for a reason… we’re not on Bootstrap 4 yet).
My most recent project was trying to figure out how to evict a cache of objects that have been dirtied by a separate application, meaning that the information in our cache is now obsolete. Surprise! Also, we don’t have the keys for those objects because for some reason the Spring Cache interface doesn’t expose a method for querying the contents of a cache. My boss suggested making a new cache that would just contain indices of objects in the other caches. Then consider that we might have multiple OpenShift containers each with their own caches. I held out for the “nuke all the caches from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” approach.
So you see, even if I were to talk about my work, it would be dull. Also, for those people who think that web development isn’t real programming, well, it is.
One thing I’ve noticed during these prompts is that I end up writing the opposite of whatever the prompt is. Today I’m supposed to be writing about what I do to relax, and I ended up talking about work — right after a full paragraph explaining why I shouldn’t really be talking about work.
Just a sign of my worst personality trait, a wide contrarian streak.
What I really should be doing, instead of writing these blog posts each morning, is bicycling to work (a thing I do to relax). It takes me about an hour — more if I use the trike instead of the bicycle, so writing these blogs is taking up my riding time. So this is my last morning post — until the next writing event.
Thanks for the fun and the journey and the friends we made along the way 🙂
