"...that I only wanted to spend a month on blows up to a year as I keep going down a rabbit hole to learn new things."
As long as it does not impact family time and such, how is this a problem? You're passionate and driven enough to keep working on side projects and learn new things all along, that's just awesome!!
Personally I just export a CSV file with my monthly bank transactions that I feed to a django app I've made.
1/ It flags suspicious entries according to rules that I manually add and it automatically highlights transactions involving new parties.
2/ I've added tags to be able to classify the expenses and present them in a pie chart so I can at a glance see if I was on track or not last month and adjust things the next one.
In the end it took 2h to write, I spent now 5min / month on this reviewing, I've found the bank made an error and was charging me for something I've never signed for and I'm finally following a loose budget and building savings in a "relaxed" way.
* CI tooling (ie for git push master to be automatically deployed to kubernetes) requires eg git + travis which is somewhat expensive for eg personal development, or manual devops work, which is somewhat expensive work-hours wise
We're using gitlab which can integrate and manage with one kubernetes cluster with the free Gitlab CE licence. Now we did the minimal integration with it (as in we're still deploying our own tiller) to be able to use kubectl and helm from within gitlab-ci.yml scripts. It works quite nicely especially to test stuff in a personal capacity or in dev/staging.
* CI deployment time for eg docker builds on Travis can take 3-5 minutes, which is not great if prod breaks
We had the same issue that we somehow solved by building new images on top of existing ones to reduce build time and having sensible image tagging so we always have a rollback at hand without rebuilding inside gitlab's registry. This has been proved useful more than once when dealing with production systems.
* setup time for each microservice is just on the boundary where it happens infrequently enough to not get scripted, but each new one takes an hour to set up manually
That's also something we struggled with so we extended the time we were allocating to building the helm charts and so on but still no gold. Only semi-effective counter measure we found to this is to work on an internal helm scripts boilerplate of some sort to base all the projects on. But it helps since we are working on projects close one to another and with "preselected" technologies. But yeah i feel the pain on that one too.
My profile is the one of a Jack of All trades as I've always had extended responsabilities spawning accross specialities (Sysadmin, web dev, project/process management).
I'm currently looking for linux sysadmin positions with a heavy accent on automation or a devops engineer role.
1/ On your side, you need to make sure you know what you want (at the very least the big picture)with a rough idea on priorities and communicate it to your contractors well. Reserve some time for questions on their side and be generally open. In return, listen to their technical feedback and take it on account when weighting on decisions. After all, you hired them because they have some level of technical expertise that you don't have.
2/ On their side, your contractors must be comfortable with showing their progress on a regular basis. This is tremendously important so you can see how things are moving, catch problems before they arise and overall steer the whole ship if need be. It is also really important that they are able to explain what they are doing and why do they do it in this order as after all they are working for you.
Finding this balance will essentially make sure the contractors have what they need to fill your expectations while making sure on your side you actually have what you are paying for.
I wanted to take the measurement approach (with a fitbit) but I quickly discovered that it was mostly metrics difficult to measure (how sluggish did I feel that day? was my weekend spend in bed? ...) so I kept a journal and resorted to trial and error.
Initial plan was to wake up ealier by 30min deltas every other day but well it's not a sleep study: I had a daily job to attend so I was a bit limited there. Also I was on the search for a permanent solution, so I preferred testing a wake up time at least 2 weeks before seeing if it fits or not.
From then on, I knew already that 6.30am was hell and we had 2 weeks where I needed to be early at work so I shifted my wake to 6am. I noticed it was quite a lot easier to get out of bed; mind you not a celebration or anything but noticeably easier.
For the second part, it was more a shot in the dark as I basically took the difference between a good wake up time (8.30am) and a bad one (6.30am) which led me to believe that the next good slot was around 4.30am. Which was verified again over 3 weeks. I tried intermediary times and they all proved to be worse than those "sweet spots".
One thing though I tried to smooth whole wake-up process so I prepare now everything the day before (clothes, mug, laptop, ...), I have this light box in the bathroom that's like a little sun, I bought a "real" coffee machine, ... and I go to bed as soon as I yawn a bit too much (~10pm as said earlier).
This is my two cents, I've asked something similar a while ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8946451), there's some really good answers there. Unfortunately, I've tried them all but there was always something kicking me back in the "old night owl habits".
To give you an idea, my typical (great) day in the holidays was something like bed around 1am, wake up at 9am/10am.
Same as you this was difficult to accomodate when you have to wake up at 6.30am-7am the latest to go to the office.
After much experimenting, I've found out I have 3 "wake up slots" where I can wake up with no efforts and feeling refreshed. During the last months they changed a bit but finally stabilized to : between 4.30am-5am, at 6am sharp and between 8-9am. Same with falling asleep, I can fall asleep in 20min or less if I'm in bed around 10pm or around 11pm. Anything after that and I have trouble to fall asleep - the owl is still around! :)
List of benefits is quite long but here's the best 3 for me:
- I'm in an "auto-piloted equilibrium" ; if I go to bed a 10pm I automatically wake up at 6am. If I go to bed at 11pm, I will still wake up at 6am but the evening after I will feel the urge to go to bed at 9.30pm already. I'm just not fighting it and oblige.
- Since my sleeping pattern is balanced, I don't feel worried or gloomy about sleep anymore (the "pff i will wake up late feeling like shit again" thoughts). I know that it will welcome me (which in turn makes it better). Mood improved a LOT.
- I don't need no stinky alarm clock in the morning. I set one up just in case but I haven't heard it for a long time.
Aside of that what helped also was to use a light box in the morning and having something to do right away ; I usually look forward watching a lecture on youtube while having my morning coffee.
Interestingly, it's been a month that I changed jobs for a full remote position. I thought the owl would come back (with a vengeance) but actually it is not the case at all! I've now completely ditched my alarm clock and I'm always up between 6-6.10am and slowly using the previous commute time for other things (sport mostly).
As said above, the owl is still there, I just give it free reigns over the weekend and not the week days =)
I actually freaked out recently when my wrist went really sore to the point of almost getting blocked.
Since i got an ergonomic keyboard, slowed down my typing pace (whilst aiming to do less typos) and generally try not to use my mouse at all everything's fine again but it scared me a bit.
I'm trying to have small incremental changes but it is pretty difficult sometimes as I have to deal with user support / management tasks and sysadmin tasks on top of my dev duties. Small institutions, yaaaay!
Being a HPC sysadmin, I was in a similar kind of situation. More often than not I get crazy requests for implementation + dev + debug support. This started to severely interfere with my other attributions so I decided to change things.
1/ Set a strict line in the support provided:
I'm happy to give a hand as long as it is mail support and whenever I have the time to reply. No direct interaction with the user code whatsoever. Otherwise we agree on a number of hours I would spend on this and they would be charged for it.
2/ Use the liberated time to set up a knowledge base:
Currently I've set up a wiki, a FAQ and I'm giving free courses (101 + good practices). I try to keep everything up-to-date by adding the questions/answers I get to it.
It was not easy especially at first (convince someone non tech-savvy that their model was at fault when the error logs displays 1 error coming from the model and 80 coming from MPI processes was quite hard) but now in about 80% of the requests you could see they've started looking for stuff by themselves before contacting me. Which is really pleasant!
In your particular case I would involve the customer support in the documentation writing (at least a FAQ) so that they actually see how painful and time consuming it is to write those things. On the dev side, the technical documentation should have some good practices nuggets here and there, for example in the part where you explain server cnnection by showing the actual command line to use you could add a comment like "#connection using hostname to keep it IP independent". Which might lead a couple of newbies and junior dev to the right path. On API level ideally it should enforce good practices by enforcing more strict rules (connection only possible using hostname f.e.).
But as soon as you actually touch the system or machine of the client you should at least be legally covered. And given the set of skills involved and how the time spent here won't be available somewhere else they also should be charged for it.
PhD in microscopy image analysis here, full academia.
Mainly prototyping with MATLAB/Python, I'm trying not to let my C/C++ skills rust too much by having a few side projects (rewriting old commodore/amiga games now, I love you Pang!)
As long as it does not impact family time and such, how is this a problem? You're passionate and driven enough to keep working on side projects and learn new things all along, that's just awesome!!