Catching up with Tech Reading for Work                    2023-04-17
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It's getting near to a release day at work. At other times I'm
usually rather busy, jumping around between a multitude of different
tasks.  Such is life in a small company, which keeps it interesting!
When it's time to get ready for a release, though, I force myself to
avoid that pattern.  It's too easy to make a mistake or overlook
something when your screen is a mess of disparate stuff, regardless
of whether a checklist is being followed.

The nature of what we work on means it can't be fully tested in an
automated manner with a mainstream CI/CD pipeline. There's always at
least a bit of semi-manual work across distros, kernels, CPU
architectures. There's always a bunch of waiting around for the
automated bits to run, too.

I generally pull out my laptop when there is a bit of a wait, and
start catching up withg relevant HPC, Linux, and general tech things.
Usually it's LWN.net first, as a good place to get a nicely condensed
overview of what's happen in the world of Linux and Linux
distributions. After LWN, I'll look through some HPC related news
feeds, then follow any interesting links that have been posted by a
few people on social media (who seem to identify most of the relevant
topics of the day).

I used to read much more long-form tech stuff outside of work, but in
the past few years I've been browsing everything but tech before bed.
I don't feel less informed, having sussed out how to efficiently
catch up with work related things on work time, periodically.
Instead, reading a bunch of stuff about social history, or travel, or
whatever else, is a lot more fun than endless waffle about large
language models, or the latest thing that's coming soon to Ubuntu.

Here's a recent find, that was explored for a few nights... a trove
of black and white photos of Cornish mines:

  https://www.cornishmineimages.co.uk/

It claims 225 pages, and over 4,600 photos... so it takes a while to
go through :-)