I've worked in the Project Delivery space for almost 10 years now. I'm not even sure that's an official "space".

All I know is, for almost a decade I turn up to the office (remotely more recently) to work on projects the company is trying to get to market.

Projects are a funny phenomenon in business, and I'm not sure everyone has the same take on them.

So, I've signed up at Code Club NZ. I've got myself a venue. I've bought and built 10 laptops.

What do I need next?

So I Started a Code Club Last Year​

Why?

Good question. I've never seen myself working with kids in any capacity, let alone teaching them stuff. But there I was last August 2018 embarking on a small mission to start and run a code club to try and get more Pacific Island kids into IT by showing them how to code, and that computers were cool things you could learn and do lots of crazy and wonderful stuff on!

Going over the holiday period and into the new year, as a contractor, usually means time off work, which means you're not getting paid. If you haven't been keeping your finances in check, this might be cause for alarm, anxiety, even panic. Otherwise, its par for the course of the contractors life.

“There may be people that have more talent than you, but theres no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.” - Derek Jeter.

Getting training in order to acquire the skills you need to do your job as well as to grow your skillset to open your options career-wise is a key consideration for anyone working in I.T.

In Part 1, we looked at the apps and other tools that I come across and use not only in my day to day work as a contractor, but also in my personal projects as well.

I wanted to list and give a brief overview and explanation of why I use the things I do, for the things I do ;)

In this post I'm going to look at Project Management tools and well as the applications and tools I use for CI/CD and 'DevOps' work.

In your professional life, you're going to come across and use a wide range of applications and tools to get the job done. I'm always amazed when looking over someone's shoulder (with their permission of course haha) and seeing how they do their "thing", even if we both do the same job, people will have their favourite apps and ways of doing things (some of it is insightful, others - annoying haha).

I wanted to list and give a brief overview and explanation of why I use the things I do, for the things I do ;)

In this post I'm going to look at the Operating System, text editors, Terminals and finally Desktop Management tools.

In this day there's little privacy, everyone's information and what they're up to is all over social media and if you want to find out what people are saying, where they work what they do - its all online.

So it stands to reason that what you do for work, what you can do skills wise, is also available online.

the pros and cons of the way things are right now with respect to our information is probably a topic for another time, but for the purposes of this post our lives and our information is out there for everyone to see and it is what it is.

My mum would always tell my brothers and I

"a good name is better than a pretty face"

To tell you the truth legacy systems have been the bane of my career. The technology is outdated, limited, often restricted by surrounding legacy systems and then vulnerable security-wise. Often in my role I'll be tasked with figuring out and delivering a re-configuring, upgrade, migration of old applications, using old software running on outdated operating systems.

What often makes it worse is that the system you're looking at won't have any internal documentation about how it was setup. No worries, I'll Google a manual or the vendors documentation. This usually turns out to be either non-existent, outdated, limited to the point of being completely useless, or the wrong i.e. the documentation doesn't line up with what you're running.

This is usually only the beginning of the challenges you face dealing with legacy systems.

So, why. Why is it like this?

Guys in my position are generally pretty busy people. We're usually outnumbered by requests, situations, questions, tasks and people to help, manage or get back to.

Not to blow our collective horns for those of us who identify with this space, but we're pretty scarce and in high demand.

Not because we're rockstars (far from it).

But we possess a cross-section of skills and experience, not deliberately acquired (in my case anyway), but that has been built up due to the need for them at various times in our careers.