![SST-CDK-CFN-ALL-HACKS-MEME](/assets/images/blog/2024/01/31/00-cover.png)

I've had a lot to say about SST/CDK and CloudFormation over the last couple of years. In my professional capacity as a Cloud Engineering Consultant I've been exposed to these tools more and more. I've watched adoption increase steadily across various enterprises now and I've seen the lines between Platform Infrastructure and App Infrastructure blur as a result of it.

Unfortunately I think the promises made by these new tools have been very misleading and have relied upon a massive over simplification of the Platform Engineers role and responsibilities.

This has led to misguided decision making and a belief that the role of the Platform Engineer can be rolled up into a simple additional duty of the App Developer but I've only ever seen it cause massive confusion, pain and inefficiencies.

I think you can be forgiven for thinking that App Developers can do it all with the help of tools like SST/CDK, that's the dream they seem to be selling afterall but we're a long long way from this being reality and I'm not sure it ever will be a thing or even if it should be something we strive for.

The tools just aren't mature enough and as I've been saying for a long time now, they're built on shakey foundations. I've analysed the tools and I've pointed out the many weaknesses and flaws that I thought existed, as well as the fact that other industry leading tools exist that are mature and already do everything better, certainly from a Platform Engineering and Operations perspective.

You may have read a couple of my previous rants on this blog about things I dislike about CloudFormation and CDK. CloudFormation has always sucked, always been slow. I thought CDK had a horrible API and in general the design choices and being nothing but an abstraction over CloudFormation made me want to cry.

Imagine my surprise when not only is everything I've said confirmed on a blog post but this blog post was written by none other than the SST devs. That's right the SST Gods themselves have spoken and they took that opportunity to absolutely shit on CDK and CloudFormation. I won't cover everything in this blog post, please just go and read it yourself [here](https://sst.dev/blog/moving-away-from-cdk.html). It's a doozy!

But let's go over a few of my personal highlights....

**CDK Is Not IaC, It’s a CFN Hack**

Finally it's official. CDK is not Infrastructure as Code. I've made many arguments about this and the fact that infrastructure code should be clearly expressed and easy to reason about.

Terraform is a mature industry standard product that has it's own purpose built Domain Specific Language to ensure that this is the case.

Using a general purpose language like TypeScript to interact with an abstraction like CDK which is an abstraction itself over CloudFormation just never sat right with me.

I really like the way SST put it when they said CDK is nothing more than a JSON Generator!

**Custom Resources**

CDK has something called Custom Resources. A basic escape hatch that let's CDK support additional features during deployments that otherwise can't be supported because CloudFormation templates can't run code.

These Custom Resources have been a complete nightmare in my experience. They cannot be tamed, you can't rename them or easily control anything about them such as node version they run for example. They can also severely break your deployments and even make it impossible for you to remove a broken stack afterwards.

I will be happy to never have to think about these ever again!

**SST is basically a nice debug tool**

SST admit they are where they are because they basically offered the best Live Lambda Debugger. I've made this point many times. When I wear my developer had I think SST is a great tool and makes debugging lambdas and remote AWS apps a breeze. But I absolutely do not think it should be used anywhere outside of a developer account or sandbox. When the code works then I think it should be handed over to let Platform Engineers choose the best way to deploy, secure and scale the infrastructure required.

**SST has made their intentions clear**

I've made the argument before that SST is great for the things it's designed for. It's fantastic as a debug tool. It's fantastic to quickly get a web app deployed, especially a NextJs app. But that's pretty much all I thought it was for.

The SST team has made it clear now that they see themselves being a competitor to Vercel which means being multi-cloud and also not limited to just NextJs but also becoming the best product to deploy modern web apps from any popular framework be that NextJs, Astro, Remix or even SvelteKit

Their focus is not your enterprise apps running in AWS.

**If you used CDK in your SST apps, your upgrade path is going to suck**

SST have warned that if you did fall into the trap they set of using CDK constructs then your upgrade path is going to be horrendous when moving to SST V3 unless you stuck to the very low level L1 constructs.

What this means is that anyone supporting a large V2 SST app right now has just been handed a bunch of technical debt to address in the very near future!

**SST V3 - Pulumi+Terraform FTW!**

The best news in all of this for me is that the bad tooling is being abandoned and they now have a great opportunity to build something great based on solid foundations and mature tooling as they're using a mixture of Pulumi and Terraform.

I'm actually quite looking forward to seeing V3 of SST and putting V2 with it's shaky CloudFormation foundations out of my mind forever!


Read the full SST blog about why they are ditching CDK/CFN

CDK IS A HACK

![cover](/assets/images/blog/2023/12/13/00-cover.png)

# AGILE IS AN OXYMORON

### It's been a while since I've posted a good tech related rant but this one I cannot keep inside any longer.

I've worked in tech for decades now. I went from a self-taught teenager hacking away in my bedroom on my own apps, to junior software developer, then senior software engineer, all the way up to principal software engineer and eventually founder and consultant of my own tech company. During that time I've seen everything and I've been exposed to every different type of technology and way of working that came and went along the way.

I'm old enough to remember when Agile seemed like a good idea and I'm bitter enough now to tell you that it was the biggest mistake we made as an industry.  As with most good things eventually corporations latch onto it, misunderstand it, abuse it and ruin the lives of every once passionate dev along the way.

I mean it I look at our industry now and I think it's a joke.

Agile when used correctly inside true tech companies that understand the development process can be great. I'm no fan of Scrum as you'll discover reading this post but even Scrum when done properly can be very effective. I've worked in many mature product teams that iterated quickly and delivered working software to end users and stakeholders at the end of every sprint. When it's like this Sprints really do feel like sprinting. Sadly I've not seen this for many years now as I tend to consult in large enterprise organisations where Agile is a buzzword and has absolutely no semblance on the day to day operations. Companies seem to think they need to say they are Agile, they seem to think that Scrum is something they should be doing in perpetuity completely missing the point of Scrum, and are so paralysed by process in the giant enterprise machine that everything either grinds to a complete halt or demoralises and burns people out completely.

It's my honest belief that most big organisations just don't know how to do Agile. They are too big they are usually too set in their ways and the corporate structure and bureaucracy crushes any chance of being truly Agile. These companies instead pick and choose which bits they think applies to them and discard the rest like it somehow wasn't important and doesn't matter. Most of the work planned in by these types of organisations doesn't fit with Agile and usually doesn't have any actual requirement to be Agile. It's usually a lot of design up front and/or hard deadlines, everybody knows it's waterfall but we must all join in and pretend that it's Agile for the sake of being Agile.

They then bring Scrum into the mix to really slow things down. Meeting after meetings because it's "Agile" that do nothing except reduce the time available to actually build working software and cause devs to context switch and come out of their productive focused zone.  Countless wasted hours trying to come up with futile estimations that do not matter in any way AT ALL because the work needs to be done either way and everybody knows it. This leads me to one of my biggest bug bears with out industry today:
### [Poker Planning](https://pokerplanning.org/)

Our industry has so much delusions of grandeur that we invented an entirely new way to estimate work rather than just JFDI. Honestly I think it's bonkers that we've invented an entire game just to estimate a piece of work. The only rule of Poker Planning is that "time is a naughty word" but we have 2 weeks in the sprint to deliver work and we need to fit as much as we think we can do in those 2 weeks, but remember work doesn't take time it takes points. WTAF.

Oh and the best thing about this is we've obediently played the Poker Planning game for years now, we banish the concept of time from our minds and we shout out numbers that represent the complexity of the work at hand. We then fit what we can into a sprint and then we deliver to a deadline that is usually decided by some outside force, either management or an overly aggressive salesman, definitely not by anybody that was close to the work itself or had any understanding about the complexity or risk involved in said work.

Seriously Poker Planning is so retarded it genuinely hurts my soul and if these companies would just get away from the dogma of insisting we do the Scrum dance they'd see how entirely pointless it is.

I've worked in teams where we regularly did [Mob programming](https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/mob-programming/) where we practised #noestimates.  It's amazing how much more productive a team is that has zero meetings and doesn't needlessly waste time trying to estimate how long the work will take and instead just does the work, but I digress.

Even if we don't go as extreme as this there are better ways of being "Agile". [Kanban](https://www.atlassian.com/agile/kanban) for example is all I believe companies really need. As long as there is a list of work that needs to be done and some general agreement about which work is highest priority then what more do we need? Just work on the thing that is most important and concentrate on delivering it. Once it's delivered work on the next most important thing and deliver that.
Scrum is just Kanban with extra steps and these extra steps suck all the enjoyment and enthusiasm out of a tech team faster than anything else I know.

So why do companies insist on Scrum if there are other alternatives that waste less time, deliver more working software and don't generally make the devs want to hang themselves? CONTROL. Corporations especially big ones cannot let go of that control. They must micro-manage everything that anybody tries to do to the nth degree until they've ensured that every deadline has been missed, every budget has been exceeded and every once happy engineer is questioning the terrible life choices they made to get here. I can prove this is about control and not an attempt to better set peoples expectations too. You only have to refer back to some of the parts of Agile that corporations like to conveniently ignore. Burn down/up charts.

Now we all know they love to track all these numbers that we put on estimates and salivate whenever it's time to review a good burn-down chart but this proves my point. True tech people know that those things aren't meant for middle managers. They are supposed to stay in the team. They are an artefact for the team to learn from so they can adjust their own expectations and try to improve things. THEY ARE NOT MEANT FOR MANAGEMENT TO USE AS A STICK OR AS A TOOL TO CONVINCE MANAGEMENT THAT PEOPLE AREN'T SLACKING OFF.

Here's a little secret: Empowered, autonomous engineers don't slack off. They enjoy the work that they do and feel proud when they deliver.

Want some more proof that control is more important than effective, motivated software teams that deliver value regularly to customers? Just look at the tool that we're all forced to use:

### [JIRA](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira)

This software is slow, clunky, never flexible enough to feel like it complements your workflow and above all else...[HATED](https://ifuckinghatejira.com/) universally across the board by literally every single software engineer on planet earth.

How in 2023 in the tech industry have we settled on a tool this bad that doesn't even let you assign more than a single dev to a ticket? In all the best organisations and software teams that I've worked in, pair-programming (at the very least) has been a standard way of working if not mob programming.  JIRA is forced on everyone for one reason and one reason only. It lets Scrum Masters and other management types track meaningless numbers and gives them that gooey feeling inside when they can look at a burn down chart. The problem is the "board" isn't the work, the work is the work but the work becomes secondary to the board. Things change during a sprint, you don't always end up working on the things you thought you would a week or so ago but heaven forbid we move things around and bring new tickets into the board to reflect the work we actually had to do, oh no, that would affect the managers view of the success of the sprint.

You see the problem?  What are we doing here?

We've adopted the name Agile and somehow we've ended up implementing the least Agile and most Rigid way of working possible. We have layers and layers of process that we refuse to address. Nothing ever changes once you get into this mess. Instead of just trusting expert engineers to collaborate and work on solutions and ship working software on time we just demoralise everybody instead and make sure that nobody can be effective.

It's not just Jira either. Organisations usually like to top-down dictate the tools and processes that they want to apply across the organisation. This to me again couldn't be further from Agile if it tried. What happened to "people and conversations above processes and tools"? What happened to letting the experts on the ground collaborate and choose the correct tool for the job? Instead one bad choice early on instead leads to many more bad choices and this never ends.

In companies that empower smaller teams to truly innovate on the projects they own I always find that more collaboration happens naturally and better solutions result.

Another big reason why I think Agile has failed as an experiment is Scrum Masters. These people that have usually not come up through the ranks as software engineers just go off and do a course and come back with a head full of theory on how software engineering works. This to me is no different than a diversity hire. I, like all the best software engineers and software engineering manages I know work best when I'm working with fellow experts.

Reminds me of a quote that my good friend Luke used to like back in our MediaCom days...

> **In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is.** - Albert Einstein

---

In truth I don't know what the answer even is to this situation that we've all stumbled into. Every big corporation you walk into now has the exact same set up, makes some combination of the same mistakes and sprinkles in a few of their own that come from their unique brand of corporate demons in the cupboard.

I think Steve Jobs had the right idea though.

> **It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.** - Steve Jobs

I truly hope that as the next generation of software engineers comes through with all their fancy new AI and tooling that real change can happen in our industry. I don't see youngsters having much patience for the bullshit that we currently have to endure in the industry. They move fast and deliver innovation and I would be willing to bet most of them haven't heard of a JIRA board.

/rant 

OUR INDUSTRY IS DUMB

![SST Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/10/09/00-cover.png)

This week I've had to write CDK code into an existing SST application. I needed to look up the 3x private Subnets for 
a custom VPC (obviously created externally of the SST application as you'd expect), so that I could create an 
Application Load Balancer that would support the application when dealing with its private APIs. What I found was this 
code was working when I ran the `sst build | sst deploy | sst diff` commands against one account, but would fail when targeting
a different account. So imagine it would succeed against a `sandbox` account but would then fail against a `staging` 
account despite both accounts being configured in exactly the same way from the same external Infrastructure as Code.

After a number of hours of tedious checking and comparing, both by looking at the various Subnets configurations 
in the AWS Console and also via the AWS CLI using commands like `aws ec2 describe-subnets` I concluded that everything
was in order and the issue must lay elsewhere. 

### Enter CDK Context. 

I decided there might be something cached by SST that was causing the weird outputs that I was seeing, so I decided to 
try and eliminate this by cloning the repo to another directory. I did this and then tried to execute the `sst build` 
against the same accounts again. 

To my surprise this broke in the same way even when targeting the accounts that had worked previously. I dug into the 
CDK source code to look at the `Vpc.fromLookup()` method in more detail and I found this nice message. 

> Import an existing VPC by querying the AWS environment this stack is deployed to.
> This function only needs to be used to use VPCs not defined in your CDK application. If you are looking to share a VPC 
> between stacks, you can pass the Vpc object between stacks and use it as normal.
> Calling this method will lead to a lookup when the CDK CLI is executed. You can therefore not use any values that 
> will only be available at CloudFormation execution time (i.e., Tokens). The VPC information will be cached in 
> cdk.context.json and the same VPC will be used on future runs. To refresh the lookup, you will have to evict the 
> value from the cache using the cdk context command. See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/context.html 
> for more information.

At this point I was convinced there must be something going on with the cache and I would just delete the context 
entirely in both copies of my repo. I ran `cdk context --clear` in both directories and tried `sst build` again. 

Now neither would build against any accounts, instead both times I just received an error that I couldn't access 
subnet[2] of undefined. So I decided to try to re-produce in new repo. I created a single stack that did a Vpc Lookup 
and logged out each private Subnet ID to the console.

I was expecting to see 3x results as the private VPC I was referencing contains 3x private Subnets. 

```javascript
// ID of a VPC that has 3x private subnets  
const vpcID = "vpc-???"

const vpc = Vpc.fromLookup(stack, "vpc-lookup", {
    vpcId: vpcID
})

vpc.privateSubnets.map(x => console.log(`Subnet ID: ${x.subnetId}`))
```

To my surprise I saw the following output:

```shell
Subnet ID: p-12345
Subnet ID: p-67890
Subnet ID: subnet-... (real value was returned here)
Subnet ID: subnet-... (real value was returned here)
Subnet ID: subnet-... (real value was returned here)
```

It seems that if you already have a CDK Context (cdk.context.json) that contains the VPC and Subnet information then 
your code will behave as expected and return you the 3x private Subnets and it will log out the IDs. If you don't have 
the CDK Context it seems to just return 2x Subnets with dummy placeholder values.  The problem with this is if your 
code is expecting and depends upon 3x private Subnets then the `sst build` errors before it runs for real to fetch the 
actual values.

We can prove this by doing the following instead.

```javascript
  // Insert the ID of a VPC that has 3x private subnets here
const vpcID = "vpc-???" 

const vpc = Vpc.fromLookup(stack, "vpc-lookup", {
    vpcId: vpcID
})

// With a CDK Context this will print out the Subnet IDs
// for all 3 of my private subnets
// Without a CDK Context this will print out 2x dummy Subnet IDs
// then it will look up the real VPC and print out the 3x REAL Subnet IDs
console.log(`Subnet 1 ID: ${vpc.privateSubnets[0].subnetId}`)
console.log(`Subnet 2 ID: ${vpc.privateSubnets[1].subnetId}`)

// If we include this line then we will get an error because
// the privateSubnets array only contains 2 dummy values,
// and we're trying to reference the third value that would
// only be looked up later
console.log(`Subnet 3 ID: ${vpc.privateSubnets[2].subnetId}`)

// Without trying to access the third private subnet the actual output will be
// Subnet 1 ID: p-12345 // dummy placeholder
// Subnet 2 ID: p-67890 // dummy placeholder
// Subnet 1 ID: subnet-?????? // first real value
// Subnet 2 ID: subnet-?????? // second real value
// Subnet 3 ID: subnet-?????? // third real value
```
As mentioned in the comments, if you comment out that third console.log then the `sst build` will succeed. You will get 
similar output to above where you will see the 2x placeholder values and then the 3x real values afterward.

If you include the third console.log then the `sst build` will error and quit because the code is trying to log out 
a third Subnet ID which doesn't exist in the dummy response. 

If you have a valid CDK Context already with all of your VPC and Subnet data in it, then you will see a single output: 

```shell
Subnet 1 ID: subnet-... (real value was returned here)
Subnet 2 ID: subnet-... (real value was returned here)
Subnet 3 ID: subnet-... (real value was returned here)
```

---
EDIT: ~~Who is to blame here? Is this CDK or is this SST?~~

CDK is at fault here. I have now recreated the problem in a pure CDK [sample project](https://github.com/liam-reilly-info/cdk-context-bug). 
It's unfortunate that my post here tarred SST with this issue, but unfortunately I'm forced to support SST and it's 
built on CDK and CloudFormation. I guess they are always going to suffer for problems beyond their control.

Download the sample code using CDK [here](https://github.com/liam-reilly-info/cdk-context-bug)

Download the sample code using SST & CDK [here](https://github.com/liam-reilly-info/sst-cdk-context-bug)

---
Surely I should be able to look up basic information such as Vpc and
Subnet details? I cannot be expected to always have an CDK Context that happens to contain this information?

It's stuff like this that make me despair and miss Terraform. I've never in my life had to worry about such basic things
as this, and I've been building cloud infrastructure, applications and services for almost a decade at this point.


STILL SST-RUGGLING

![Terraform](/assets/images/blog/2023/10/03/00-cover.png)

I have thought about this for a while now and I need to discuss what a nightmare it is to work with 
SST/CDK/CloudFormation in an enterprise environment. SST an abstraction over an abstraction (CDK) which is itself an 
abstraction of CloudFormation. 3 layers of indirection away from your actual cloud resources.

**YES** it is as painful as it sounds.

> TLDR: CloudFormation sucks. CDK really sucks. SST is great at the things it controls but unfortunately its 
> foundations SUCK.
> But there is hope. SST are looking at a version that is based on Terraform.

Before I go any further if you haven't already read my [post](https://www.liam-reilly.info/blog/post/serverless-infra/) 
on Serverless Framework/CloudFormation please do so now. It's funny I've just re-read this post now and I realise how 
many of the issues I've experienced with SST/CDK/CloudFormation on this current project were things I've already 
documented and complained about over a year ago on another enterprise project using Serverless Framework and 
CloudFormation rather than SST, CDK and CloudFormation.

Guess what? CloudFormation sucks!

Anyway back to this post...

---
If you ask me about SST with my software engineer head on I will tell you that I think it is a cool piece of technology 
that really helps improve the day-to-day developer experience. It makes it quick and easy to write and debug our 
Serverless code and the way it proxies messages between your local machine and AWS is as close to magic as I can 
remember experiencing in a long time.

If you ask me about SST with my enterprise platform engineering head on I will tell you I hate it and I never want to 
hear of it again. Out of the box it's wild and out of control and without a decent level of knowledge it's impossible to
tame. Most of the problems I've seen in the wild come from a lack of understanding and a lack of explicit configuration 
which is possible to add if you know what you need, but I think SST is targeting people that don't have this knowledge!

Sadly I think SST also suffers from some unfortunate limitations that they cannot control that come from the CDK 
foundations it is built on.

Because of this it makes managing AWS infrastructure in an enterprise project far more difficult that any other tool 
I've used yet.

My pain comes not really from SST but from its shaky foundations. CloudFormation is not my favourite technology in the 
first place and I think it comes with many limitation and problems of its own but CDK is a truly half-baked, unfinished 
and poorly designed product from Amazon which I really wish didn't exist.

Together SST, CDK and CloudFormation make my day-to-day life an absolute misery.

---

Again I'd like to re-iterate I do not blame nor am I attacking SST here. I think SST is a cool project and does what it 
is designed to do extremely well. I see SST as a great project to get teams moving fast with an idea. It means devs can 
concentrate on deploying and proving out an idea quickly without needing to have expert knowledge on how AWS works or 
what the different services are and how they fit together.

SST is NOT designed for large enterprise projects that already have Platform Engineering teams and expert knowledge that 
need to configure infrastructure in very specific and advanced ways.

I also think it's unfortunate that SST has built in keywords such as [use](https://docs.sst.dev/advanced/cross-stack-references)
which allow Stacks to directly reference resources that were defined in other Stacks. I understand this is helpful to 
get going quickly and could be acceptable in limited use cases and small apps, but it encourages bad practices as apps 
can grow and grow and all the different stacks can reference each other directly meaning deployments end up being a big 
ball of mud rather than small independently deployable microservices which I believe it was SST is designed for and 
would really excel at.

---
I also do not know whose idea this was but whoever decided that we should express complicated Infrastructure as Code 
using general purpose programming languages like TypeScript should retire immediately from tech. If allowing null was 
the [Billion-dollar mistake](https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/) 
then I think this is a Trillion-dollar mistake.

Platform Engineering is extremely complicated. AWS now offers more than 200 different products and services. The number 
1 thing you want when writing Infrastructure as Code is for it to be clear, declarative and concise, and follow a clear 
and consistent pattern and is easy to reason about at a glance.

Terraform was built to solve this exact problem. It has a custom-built DSL (Domain Specific Language) called [hcl](https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language) 
designed in a thoughtful way to ensure that Infrastructure code is clear, concise and predictable.

Terraform allows you to write re-usable modules that you can version easily and then use across your code bases safely 
by referencing different versions by release tags. Everything you write is expressed in the same predictable way. The 
code is always very easy to follow and understand.

It even has useful concepts such as [workspaces](https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/state/workspaces) 
which mean you can write a define your infrastructure once and then switch work spaces to target different environments 
in AWS and simply use different variables based on the environment. 
You do not need to copy and paste and maintain multiple versions of the same thing because you want them in multiple 
environments.

Replacing a mature Infrastructure as Code product such as Terraform with its custom DSL with a general purpose language,
especially one as messy as TypeScript to write Infrastructure code seems to be one of the worst decisions in the 
history of computing in my opinion.

My reasoning here is four-fold.

1: TypeScript and many other languages that CDK supports allow you to write some truly messy code. The last thing you 
want for Infrastructure Code.

2: Languages like TypeScript generally attract more junior and less experienced software engineers, due to the low 
barrier to entry and online buzz amongst streamers around modern web development, this is especially true with projects
using SST as this solves for this very scenario.

3: The line between Platform Infrastructure code and Application Infrastructure code is blurred and soon becomes a big 
ball of mud that is hard to deploy.

4: Languages like TypeScript and especially tools like SST/CDK give developers a false sense of understanding of the 
complexity of building and maintaining Cloud based applications and services.

Replacing a mature product like Terraform with a truly half-baked and dare I say abandoned product like CDK is madness. 
Everyday working with CDK we discover another basic thing that it doesn't support that would have been a couple of lines
in Terraform, or we read another piece of CDK documentation that ends up being completely wrong. It does not have 
Level 2 constructs for the majority of resources that you need and some key things don't even have any Level 1 
constructs or support at all.

And this is completely ignoring the CloudFormation base and all the problems that come with that. Deploying permanent 
cross-cutting concerns and long lived infrastructure as CloudFormation stacks is not my idea of fun because you just 
cannot depend on it to pick up future changes. It might not error, but it probably won't update your resources to the 
new specification you expressed in the code base. Terraform will ALWAYS deploy exactly what is expressed in your code 
because it maintains an external state file which is analyses every time you run a `plan` or `apply`.

CDK is NOT ready for the enterprise. I would never recommend it to any of my clients. There are much better options out 
there. Much more mature products like Terraform and even Pulumi.  Neither of these products are plagued with the 
problems or slow speeds of CloudFormation, and both of these products are mature, fully featured and support multiple 
Cloud Providers.

Which leads me onto another excellent feature of Terraform. Providers. Terraform doesn't just integrate well with Cloud 
Providers such as AWS. Through its innovative Provider plugin system Terraform now allows you to integrate and work 
with many other products and services. Things like Vault for secure secret and credential management or DataDog for 
building out your monitoring dashboards. You can Terraform Kubernetes clusters, Oracle cloud resources, Microsoft 
Active Directory. The list goes on and on.

There is a reason Terraform is the defacto standard in the industry. **It just works** and Platform Engineers across 
the globe love it.

---
In summary, I do not believe it's a good idea to blur the lines between long term Platform Infrastructure and transient 
Application Infrastructure. I think there should be a clear distinction and separation between the two. 

I also do not think it's advisable to expect application developers to be responsible for building, scaling and 
securing cloud infrastructure, especially if they are relying on starter tools like SST to abstract the complicated 
truth of the services in which they depend on away from them.  

Everyday I'm SST-ruggling

![BREAKPOINT](/assets/images/blog/2023/07/29/00-cover.png)

I decided recently I wanted to spend more of my free time gaming. I've not had much time for gaming over the last
few years. My good friend Tony invited me to join his regular Monday night gaming group and this is what led to the 
accidental discovery of my latest favourite indie game addiction: [Breakpoint](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1273250/Breakpoint/).

> Our gaming group is currently playing [Tom Clancys Ghost Recon Breakpoint](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2231380/Tom_Clancys_Ghost_Recon_Breakpoint/).
> When I searched Steam for Breakpoint I found the indie game instead. I was quickly corrected and picked up the Tom Clancy
> shooter but I decided to pick the other game up as well.
> 
> For the rest of this post assume Breakpoint is referring to the awesome little indie game and not the Tom Clancy shooter!

I've been picking up more indie games ever since I bought my Steam Deck because it's great to be able to instantly pick
up and jump into a game, play for 10 or 20 mins and then put it away again. If I ever leave the house and I know I'm 
going to be waiting around or travelling the Steam Deck usually with me. 

So what is Breakpoint? 

> Breakpoint is a twin-stick slasher where your weapons explode. Break through the swarm to claim your spot on the online leaderboard.

It sounded like a perfect Steam Deck game for me to play. It started slow, I'd play a few quick games, usually dying 
within minutes and giving up and moving on with my day. Over the next few weeks or so I started to survive a little 
longer and get a slightly higher score. 

Then I started to play the game more and more. Even in the house I would pick up the Steam Deck and play it in the kitchen 
when I was cooking. Or in bed at night before I went to sleep. The scores kept getting higher and higher. The addiction 
was growing and growing. Next I installed it on my gaming PC as well, where I'd find myself playing it whilst watching 
a podcast. I've owned this game since June and today I've just passed the 17 hours played mark. For a game that I was
meant to pick up and play for a couple of minutes here and there that's pretty crazy!

The game is incredible. It's super simple. It has a single game mode. You are just a triangle ship in a square room, and 
you have to survive 12 different types of enemies by hacking and slashing with hammers, swords, axes etc. It gets 
intense quickly. My current highest score is 390,725 which I achieved this morning, but I still regularly play games 
where I lose all 3 lives with under 5000 scored.    

The best part is there is a global scoreboard to see where you place amongst the rest of the players, and you can 
choose to watch a full replay of any game on the scoreboard (however I think some of the people at the very top have 
cheated because the replays just show them dying quickly with billions on the board afterward!?).

I am desperately chasing a million+ score now. It's within reach I'm sure just a few more games! 

This right here sums up my final thoughts about this game. It's the digital gaming version of crack! 

10/10.

BREAKPOINT

![WWDC23 Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/06/06/00-cover.png)

I'm a big fan of VR. I own a couple of Oculus headsets. I have the original Oculus Rift and the Quest 2. I'm still very 
happy with my Quest 2 and I haven't felt compelled yet to upgrade it. That said the Quest 3 looks like it's a decent 
enough upgrade that I am thinking it's likely that I will be buying it on release. But the headset that I and a lot of 
VR/AR enthusiasts have been waiting for is the Apple one and finally yesterday we got to see if for the first time. 

Apple call their new headset the Vision Pro and well let's just say it's definitely more than a little bit extra! This 
looks to be the most technologically advanced headset to ever hit the market. There is so much about this headset that
excites me.

Over 4K in each eye. Meaning you can essentially just draw yourself a 4K screen as big as you like, anywhere you like. 
Plus it's fully 3D so you can have a full immersive, 3D movie cinema experience in your own home or anywhere else you 
might be. I've been watching movies like this in big virtual cinemas in VR for years but never in this quality and this 
enables you to remain in your own environment with the virtual screen augmented into your own reality. I've been looking 
forward to this since Microsoft teased it with the [HoloLens](https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/hololens) years ago. 

I've also tried to use various virtual office environments in VR but they also fall down when trying to type on the 
keyboard. I think the Apple Vision Pro headset will finally make this possible because you can just look down at your 
keyboard like normal now because you can use your computer in AR rather than VR. Imagine that you can just carry your
new office environment around with you and just sit down and start working with big virtual 4K displays. Code on 1 virtual 
screen, web browsers on another, Apple Music/Spotify on another. No need to carry anything else around except your 
MacBook.

I'm also intrigued by the fact it can record Stereoscopic 3D video. I would love to have had this kind of tech when my 
Callum was a baby, being able to essentially go back in time to the exact moment and see it all over again as if you are
back there in full 3D is pretty amazing. I just don't think recording this on the headset itself is the best thing. I hope
they update the iPhone to enable this kind of recording instead and then use the Vision Pro headset to play those memories 
back again. 

So all of that has me very excited but oh boy I do not think I'll be rushing out to by this Version 1 product. Firstly 
the price is utterly insane. Starting from $3499 in the US so probably £3499 in the UK. That's like 7+ times the price 
of existing competing products. In what can be described as a pretty turbulent time for VR/AR in general and in the 
middle of the worst inflation in recent memory. People are struggling right now and frankly not even interested in VR and 
Meta-verses. Apple said they had courage when they took the iPhones headphone jack away, but pricing this thing like 
this is what I call courage!

The Battery life is also pretty pathetic. Around 2 hours I think, and something like 4 hours if you use the external 
(sold separately naturally) pocket-sized battery pack. Considering this is a device that's being sold for professionals 
trying to work and be productive and for winding down watching movies, this isn't good enough. The MacBooks battery lasts
all day. I think they say something like 18 hours now, why is this so bad by comparison?

I also don't like the giant glass screen on the front. Not only do I see these breaking but they actually show a digital
version of your eyes to other people in the room. It's weird and I don't like it. It's creepy. 

The creepy doesn't end their either. The headset actually creates a 3D avatar version of your face which is then used in
apps like Facetime meaning we will no longer actually see each other, but instead just see weird uncanny valley 3D avatar
versions of each other. It's so Black Mirror if you ask me.

My big concern is again related to the fact that this headset is a recording device and that it renders those creepy eyes. 
I wonder what negative effects this is going to have on small children. Babies and toddlers growing up in a world where 
their parents are constantly wearing these creepy headsets with weird digital eyes looking back at them just so they can 
record. Like I said earlier, I think this needs to be reconsidered. Use the headsets for future playback but let us record
as we always have with our existing Cameras and iPhones. 

I have also heard that the headset is very heavy. Not something that's going to be comfortable for much longer than an
hour or so to wear. This isn't good enough, not to convert the mass market. We're going to need multiple revisions and
iterations of this product to get the headset right down in size/appearance/weight etc. When all of this tech fits into
something closer to a normal pair of glasses, that's when I think people might be interested. If we get there I fully expect AV/VR
headsets to become the standard and be sold on rolling subscriptions, replacing the iPhones cycle we have today.

Apple WWDC23 - Vision Pro

![Google IO Image](/assets/images/blog/2023/05/10/00-cover.jpg)

I watched the Google I/O keynote event tonight. I used to watch these religiously with a bottle of wine and fire out hot takes on Twitter but I've not really been interested the last couple of years for...reasons.

But this year I couldn't wait. I was hoping they might reveal some of the AI tools they were building and I certainly wasn't disappointed on that front.

They dedicated the entire keynote to AI. To improvements in Bard and Pathways Language Model (PaLM) 2, and the many integrations they've built into all their other apps and services. I suspect the entire Google I/O event this year will be focussed solely on AI.

A lot of what they showed was pretty cool, but I have some concerns...

Let's start with what I thought was cool. 

## COOL THINGS

### AI MUSIC 

The keynote began with a weird DJ Music+Video experience complete with weird dancing ducks and swans with lips. The music was generated by AI. The accompanying music video was generated by AI. Both with input from the DJ. The end result was the product of a great many iterations.

Immediately I thought what this means for the future.

- With AI/AI Tools literally anybody can now become an artist.
- You don't need to learn play instruments, you just need to learn how to prompt the AI tools and iterate.
- Can't write lyrics? Don't worry, you can just keep prompting AI and it will write them for you.
- Need a music video to go with that new banger you've just made? Just keep prompting AI until you're happy with the results.
- ...
- PROFIT!

### SMART COMPOSE

They then showed some of the advancements that have been made to some existing AI powered features that we've been using for a while. I'm sure by now everybody has had Gmail suggest a sentence for you before you have to write it manually. Well its just got quite an upgrade thanks to Generative AI.

They showed a demo where they were replying to an Airline company requesting refunds for some tickets. AI wrote the entire email based on information it picked up itself and it didn't stop there. You actually have options for how much detail it goes into. You can ask it to elaborate on the initial email if you think it didn't go far enough. 🤯🤯🤯

### IMMERSIVE VIEW 

Google Maps has been updated with some nice new AI features too. They showed a demo where you can input a future journey you intend to make. It will then generate a fully 3D fly-over so you can see exactly where you are going and what your route will look like. It looked pretty nice and funnily enough I was doing the same thing manually on Google Maps about an hour before the keynote!

### MAGIC EDITOR

Google have been giving us super cool AI powered photo editing tools for years. I used to love my Pixel phones and the photo tools were unparalleled. Over the last few years both Google and Apple have given us advanced editing features where you can remove things/people/objects from photos. I think Google called it Magic Eraser. Well Magic Eraser has grown and is now Magic Editor!

In Magic Editor you can change pretty much anything you want in your photos. In the demo they showed a photo of a lady sat with her hand out with a waterfall in the background. They then used Magic Editor to completely redo the image so that the waterfall looked liked it fell right into the ladies hand. AI changed everything. You couldn't tell it wasn't the original shot. 

They also showed that you can edit the sky, move objects further into shot, out of shot, you can change anything you want really! 

### BARD

**We really are getting to the realm of the Computer from Star Trek and other futurist movies**

Bard has been developing at quite a pace it seems. It's now learned 20+ programming languages!
It's also been given a dark mode. I had to laugh at the excited cheers this generated. We're talking about world changing AI tools and people got excited over a stylesheet. 🙃😂

Bard has been extended and integrated with many more Google Services now and is about to get a lot more visual. For example you can now give Bard a photo and ask it to generate captions for you. It will even make jokes and funny captions. 
 
Bard has also been integrated with selected third-parties such as Adobe. 

Other Google services now include Bard such as Maps, Gmail, Docs and Search!

For example Search is now getting loads of Generative AI features.

They have also massively upgraded Google Shopping. Google Shopping has 1.8 billion updates an hour to its Knowledge Graph. Now Bard has access to all of that to give you an pretty insane shopping assistant! It even has a new conversational mode where you can keep asking more questions to refine you results until you get to what you want. 

Then just because why not? You can ask it do other things like 

- Build me a quiz on the product I just bought
- Think of a name for club based on the think I just bought.

I guess Google really weren't happy with Bing+ChatGPT stealing the limelight. 

### GOOGLE DOCS - (DUET AI FOR WORKSPACE)

The Google Docs tools have also been integrated with Generative AI features. 

For example they showed an example where AI can now write a complete job description for a business that's hiring a position. I bet it would do a better job than most HR departments currently do as well, being that it understands the technology we use in the jobs! 😂

They showed some cool improvements to Slides as well. Say you've written some content into a slide but need an image to go with it. AI will now generate images for you automatically based on the content you put in the slide. You can even change the style of the images it produces. You can have realistic photos, illustrations, clip art etc.  Pretty cool. 

If you're making a presentation for a talk it will even generate speaker notes for you! 

This type of functionality isn't limited to Slides. If you were writing a story/novel it can generate images/illustrations for those too. It can even prompt you with ideas for your story when you get writers block!

### BUSINESS

They also briefly discussed how businesses can use Vertex AI + Enterprise Search to build Generative AI tools and products based on your own private data. I'm interested in this. 

## NOT SO COOL THINGS

So there is a lot of good stuff there. So why am I so concerned? 

I can't help but worry about what all this means for the mental well-being of society going forward.

Let's look at a few of the cool things from above from another perspective.

### AI MUSIC

Immediately this made me realise that the days of listening to music and knowing it was created by our fellow artistic human beings are numbered. Going forward the music you hear might be completely made by AI. Initially I guess humans will prompt the AI so we'll have a kind of levelled up human music creation experience. But in the end you won't know, humans might not be involved at all.

Think about this; If we don't need humans to make music but music still makes money. What incentive do companies like Google, Apple, Spotify etc have to pay royalties to human artists? Why wouldn't they just rig the algorithms to ensure only AI generated music gets plays? 

It's not just music either, this will apply to everything. Everything you read, every article, blog post, tweet. Every video you watch, every conversation you have that isn't face to face. AI will be generating "content" everywhere and the disconnection that has messed so many of us up already is only going to get exponentially worse. 

I predict a sharp rise in depression in the human experience as everything becomes synthetic, fake, EASY. Human beings do not cope well when things are too easy. Joy comes from working hard at something and achieving something at the end. 

I fail to see how humans will achieve happiness when it feels like we've reached the end of our species usefulness and productivity. 

### MAGIC EDITOR 

The same concerns I just talked about apply here too. The power of these photo editing tools to "fix", enhance and tweak photos is way beyond just fixing a blemish or a lighting fault. These tools mean nothing we see will represent reality anymore. People aren't capturing images of the world as it is that they live in. They are creating fake versions of reality, the world as they wished it was instead of what it actually is. 

Did we learn nothing from the damage we now know Instagram Filters caused?  

I do not see how this is going to be a net benefit for society.

### GOOGLE DOCS - WITH GENERATIVE AI - (DUET AI FOR WORKSPACE)

The last thing I want to mention the new Image generation features now built into Google Docs and other AI powered tools. Whilst it's awesome from a personal end-user standpoint being able to have AI generate images on the fly to match your exact requirements. I think it's going to be pretty disastrous for artists. Especially younger artists who sell their early works like logo designs and website illustrations on websites. This allows them to build a portfolio so they can get better paying work in the future as they improve. This is gone now. If anybody can just ask the computer for their perfect image for free no less, what happens to the artists? 

## CONCLUSION

I honestly don't know how I feel at the moment with the rate of change in AI. I see the benefits and how cool it all is. But I do worry about the speed that we're hurtling into all this. I do not think society is prepared for the rapid change that is about to hit us, and I am deeply concerned that it is only ever going to get faster and harder to integrate. 



GOOGLE I/O - 2023 - KEYNOTE THOUGHTS

![Countdown](https://cdn.waterstones.com/bookjackets/large/9781/9821/9781982113674.jpg)

I finished reading the book Countdown by Shanna H. Swan, PhD today. It has taken me nearly the entire month to get through as it was not an easy read. I'm a self taught computer programmer that thinks in code, I know a lot more now about the science of human biology and reproductive systems that I ever thought I would! 😂

Now that I've read it I am concerned about the future and ultimately the survival of the Human race. 

I first heard about this book when Shanna went on the Joe Rogan podcast. If you'd prefer to listen to Shanna explain it then you can find that [here](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6pLW2tMx4Kw5qaeAcxj0Lj?si=1508a94d9dbb40f5).

I don't want to spoil the book so I will only briefly mention what it covers and use facts and figures from the cover of the book itself. I impore you to pick a copy up and give it a read for yourself, especially if you're hoping to have children of your own in the future!

The book begins by giving you quite a detailed background on how the male and female reproductive systems work and then analyses the data on global birth rates and male sperm quality. The data shows that both have been rapidly declining! Worldwide fertility rates have dropped more than 50% over the past 50 years and are still falling.

Did you know men today have half the sperm that their grandfathers had and in many places in the world a woman in her 20's is less fertile than her grandmother was at 35!

The book really goes into a lot of detail about reproductive systems and all the things that can affect peoples chances of reproducing successfully. I know from now on I would give a copy of this book to any friends/family that planning to have a baby or are struggling to conceive. 

The book covers things that are under a persons control like diet and lifestyles and but unfortunately this is only a tiny part of the story. As I've learned from listening to Shanna and reading the book we as humans are bombarded with chemicals in our food, packaging, cosmetic products, childrens toys the list goes on and on. They are literally everywhere and they are absolutely wrecking both humans and nature.

Lots of the products we use contain something called Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals like BPA and Phthalates. Here is how Wikipedia explains Endocrine Disruptors.

> Endocrine disruptors, sometimes also referred to as hormonally active agents, endocrine disrupting chemicals, or endocrine disrupting compounds are chemicals that can interfere with endocrine (or hormonal) systems. These disruptions can cause cancerous tumors, birth defects, and other developmental disorders. Found in many household and industrial products, endocrine disruptors "interfere with the synthesis, secretion, transport, binding, action, or elimination of natural hormones in the body that are responsible for development, behavior, fertility, and maintenance of homeostasis (normal cell metabolism)

These chemicals are known as forever chemicals and they exist in your body and in the environment forever. They can even affect not just your direct children but also your childrens children. They are wreaking havoc with wildlife. They are changing our hormones but they are also causing fish to be born gay and even transexual. When Alex Jones said "they're turning the Frogs Gay" and every body laughed at him, turns out he wasn't far off!

The book covers these chemicals in detail and tells you where you can find them and how to avoid them. There are calls to action and various different organisations and initiatives are trying to change the regulatory laws so we can get these dangerous chemicals banned and out of our environments.

I really hope they succeed because the way things are going, if things don't change we're doomed as a species. Did you know that Humans could now officially be placed on the endangered species list?! Of the different qualifiers Humans now safely check 3 out of 5. Already in many places around the world Humans are not replacing their aging populations at a rate that will gaurantee survival. Population collapse is a very real threat. A far bigger danger than over-population (which is a myth).

One thing that I couldn't stop wondering as I was reading the book was "where are all the activists"?

We seem to have a never ending supply of activists protesting things like Climate Change and whatever the news story of the month is. Why is nobody concerned that we're all being poisoned every day and quite literally on the brink of extinction? 

We'll be long gone before we need to worry about Climate Change...

COUNTDOWN

![Vitest Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/04/20/00-cover.jpg)

## Intro 

In my last post I wrote about how to configure testing in a modern web app built on the T3 stack. I closed the post by moaning about how much was involved. From the many packages you needed to install and the multiple configurations you needed to add just to get a simple test working. I cried out "Surely we can come up with a better way than this?".

Well it turns out we can and we have. 

Let me show you a much simpler way to get the same tests running. This time with just a couple additional packages to install and just 1 configuration file. Not a `babel.config.json` or `jest.config.json` in sight! 

We're going to use [Vitest](https://vitest.dev/) today instead of Jest.

## Configuration - Packages

First of all if you haven't already got a project you can generate a new T3 stack app using the following:

```bash
npm create t3-app@latest
```

### Vitest

```bash
npm install --save-dev vitest @vitejs/plugin-react jsdom
```

[vitest](https://www.npmjs.com/package/vitest)

[@vitejs/plugin-react](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@vitejs/plugin-react)

[jsdom](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsdom)

### Testing Library

```bash
npm install --save-dev @testing-library/react @testing-library/user-event @testing-library/jest-dom
```

[@testing-library/react](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@testing-library/react)

[@testing-library/user-event](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@testing-library/user-event)

[@testing-library/jest-dom](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@testing-library/jest-dom)

## Configuration 

### Vitest

Vitest requires a single configuration file. `vitest.config.ts` at the project root.

```javascript
import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react'
import { defineConfig } from 'vitest/config'

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [react()],
  test: {
    globals: true,
    environment: 'jsdom'
  },
})
```

### Package JSON

Find the `scripts` section and `add` the following: 

File: `package.json`

```json
 "scripts": {
    "test": "vitest"
  }
```

## Example

Here we will use the same component and test as in the previous post.

File: `/components/greeting/greeting.tsx`

```javascript
import React from "react"
import { 
    type FC
} from "react"

type Props = {
    name: string
}

const Greeting: FC<Props> = ({ name }) => {

    let greeting = `Hello ${ name }!`;

    if (name.length === 0)
        greeting = "I'm sorry I didn't catch your name?"

    return <h1>{ greeting }</h1>
}
export default Greeting
```

File: `/components/greeting/greeting.spec.tsx`

```javascript
import React from "react";
import {render, screen} from "@testing-library/react"
import "@testing-library/jest-dom"
import Greeting from "./greeting"

test("name supplied - displays personalised greeting", async () => {
  // ARRANGE
  render(<Greeting name="liam" />)

  // ACT
  await screen.findByRole("heading")

  // ASSERT
  expect(screen.getByRole("heading")).toHaveTextContent("Hello liam")
})

test("name not supplied - asks for name", async () => {
  // ARRANGE
  render(<Greeting name="" />)

  // ACT
  await screen.findByRole("heading")

  // ASSERT
  expect(screen.getByRole("heading")).toHaveTextContent("I'm sorry I didn't catch your name?")
})
```

If we run the tests using `npm run test` and everything is configured properly then the output should show 2x passing tests. 

![picture showing test results](/assets/images/blog/2023/04/20/01-tests.png)

## Outro

I think we can all agree that this setup is much cleaner than the jest+babel version in the previous post! 

It's wild how fast the frontend dev world is changing nowadays but I do love it. I do love new toys!

You can download the source code for this post

Better Testing T3 Stack Apps

![Picture of Unit Tests](/assets/images/blog/2023/04/16/00-cover.jpg)

## Intro 

I've been singing the praises of the T3 Stack for building modern web apps of late. Whilst awesome and I 
recommend it strongly to anybody starting a new React+TypeScript app it does have what could be called a serious omission. It does not configure any testing libraries at all. 

I think I understand why this is the case. I hate configuring tests in front-end land at the best of times. There are so many different plugins and configurations to add. They are a constantly moving target and the ones you use get deprecated and replaced. If that wasn't bad enough there are multiple ways to configure the them, between using `.json` files (my preference) and configuring using `.ts|.js` files. It's never what I would call a nice experience, I wish it was done for me by T3 but you can't be mad at them for staying away from this whole mess. 

I have had to configure tests recently and it was exactly as frustrating to configure this time as it was all the previous times so I thought let's write a blog and break it down so we can come back to this in 6 months time when we inevitably have to do it again!

I've got it down to a small collection of additional packages that need to be installed and just a couple of config files (`.json`).  I like to use dedicated `.json` files for these bits of config rather than a code file `.ts|.js`. I just think it makes everything easier to reason about. I also prefer them to be dedicated `.json` files rather than just dumping all config into `package.json`. I've seen some wild version of this file over the years and it's just horrible in my humble opinion.

## Configuration - Packages

First of all if you haven't already got a project you can generate a new T3 stack app using the following:

```bash
npm create t3-app@latest
```

Nex to install additional packages into `package.json` for`Babel`, `React Testing Library` and `Jest`, run the following commands:

### Babel

```bash
npm install --save-dev @babel/preset-env @babel/preset-react @babel/preset-typescript
```

[babel-preset-env](https://babeljs.io/docs/babel-preset-env)

[babel-preset-react](https://babeljs.io/docs/babel-preset-react)

[babel-preset-typescript](https://babeljs.io/docs/babel-preset-typescript)

### Testing Library

```bash
npm install --save-dev @testing-library/react @testing-library/user-event @testing-library/jest-dom
```

[@testing-library/react](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@testing-library/react)

[@testing-library/user-event](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@testing-library/user-event)

[@testing-library/jest-dom](https://www.npmjs.com/package/@testing-library/jest-dom)

### Jest

```bash
npm install --save-dev jest jest-environment-jsdom
```

[jest](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jest)

[jest-environment-jsdom](https://www.npmjs.com/package/jest-environment-jsdom)

## Configuration - Configs

### Babel 

Add a configuration file in the root of the project for Babel and paste in the following content:

File: `babel.config.json`
```json
{
  "presets": [
      "@babel/preset-env",
      "@babel/preset-react",
      "@babel/preset-typescript"
  ]
}
```

### Jest

Add a configuration file in the root of the project for Jest and paste in the following content:

File: `jest.config.json`
```json
{
    "testEnvironment": "jsdom"
}
```

### Package JSON

Find the `scripts` section and `add` the following: 

File: `package.json`

```json
 "scripts": {
    "test": "jest"
  }
```

Your `scripts` section will already include other options. I removed them here for brevity.

## Example 

Now that everything's configured let's build a simple `<Greeting>` component and add a couple of tests.    

File: `/components/greeting/greeting.tsx`

```javascript
import React from "react"
import { 
    type FC
} from "react"

type Props = {
    name: string
}

const Greeting: FC<Props> = ({ name }) => {

    let greeting = `Hello ${ name }!`;

    if (name.length === 0)
        greeting = "I'm sorry I didn't catch your name?"

    return <h1>{ greeting }</h1>
}
export default Greeting
```

File: `/components/greeting/greeting.spec.tsx`

```javascript
import React from "react";
import {render, screen} from "@testing-library/react"
import "@testing-library/jest-dom"
import Greeting from "./greeting"

test("name supplied - displays personalised greeting", async () => {
  // ARRANGE
  render(<Greeting name="liam" />)

  // ACT
  await screen.findByRole("heading")

  // ASSERT
  expect(screen.getByRole("heading")).toHaveTextContent("Hello liam")
})

test("name not supplied - asks for name", async () => {
  // ARRANGE
  render(<Greeting name="" />)

  // ACT
  await screen.findByRole("heading")

  // ASSERT
  expect(screen.getByRole("heading")).toHaveTextContent("I'm sorry I didn't catch your name?")
})
```

If we run the tests using `npm run test` and everything is configured properly then the output should show 2x passing tests. 

![picture showing test results](/assets/images/blog/2023/04/16/01-tests.png)

## Outro

I don't know what you think but that seemed liked a lot of work and a lot of crap just to get going, just so we can add tests of questionable value. 🤫
  
Surely we can come up with a better way than this? 

If you liked this post I am planning to release another post with some actual tests that will cover testing [tRPC](https://trpc.io/) with [Mock Service Worker](https://mswjs.io/docs/api) or more specifically [msw-trpc](https://www.npmjs.com/package/msw-trpc). 

If you haven't already subscribed to my [RSS](https://www.liam-reilly.info/feed.xml) feed, please do to make you don't miss it!

Testing T3 Stack Apps

![LR Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

I spent a fair chunk of time during February and March playing at being a web designer, not developer but designer. Like a proper one I was even learning how to use Figma!

Recently I've been getting a website ready to launch. Most of the website was built quite some time ago and just needed some finishing touches, some design tweaks in the colour themes and tightening up of the look and feel of the site. There were also a few infrastructure decisions needed to be made, but for all intents and purposes it was almost ready to go.  

But what's that famous quote I'm thinking of? Oh yeah from the [Ninety-ninety rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety%E2%80%93ninety_rule)

> The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

I really liked the site as it was but I just couldn't quite make everything work together so I went back to the drawing board and started to try out completely new landing page designs. I became obsessed and iterated and iterated until I came up the a design that I thought finally looked sweet. I then turned this into a working website using just an `index.html` file and a couple of `.css` files. 

Once I reached this point I started to think about some of the components on the website that will capture users input. Things like the `<ContactForm>` for example. Remember I said I had some infrastructure decisions to make? Well that was things like 

* Where do I host this website when built?
* Which data store options are available to me?
* Which language should I build the API with?

So that's when I started to look around and not just do things the way I might usually which would be:

* Host on AWS
* Store data in DynamoDb
* Write API in .NET Core

I decided to take the opportunity to evaluate some new ~~toys~~ technologies.

I ended up using the T3 Stack. Which included the following technologies:

* TypeScript
* tRPC
* Tailwind CSS
* React
* NextJS
* Prisma
* Zod

I wrote a couple of blog posts [1](/blog/post/contact-form-planet-scale/), [2](/blog/post/tailwind/) as I went and I fell in love with this stack. The developer experience of using tRPC, Zod and TypeScript is *chefs kiss*. Tailwind CSS blew my mind. I took that `index.html` and couple of `.css` files and I completely replicated it in a full T3 Stack, React and NextJS project. It has forever changed the way I will approach styling my web apps in the future. Bye bye `styled-components`. Hello `Tailwind CSS`.

So what did I achieve this month whilst all that was going on? 

* Learned how to use Figma
* Nailed a new Landing Page design
* Learned a new technology stack - T3
* Learned a new website styling technique with Tailwind and it's utility class approach
* I published articles on
    * Revisiting WARP
    * UFC 268
    * Building a `<ContactForm>` component with T3
    * Styling websites with `styled-components` VS `Tailwind CSS`
* I configured a new public GitHub account for sample project source code to accompany blog posts
* I also hit 3 full months of not drinking! 

Overall March was a pretty incredible month. I've really got the coding bug again at the moment and I'm enjoying building things more than I have in a long time.

Let's see what April brings!

BRAGGADOCIOUS BLOG! - MAR

![LR Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

Website development has changed a lot over my lifetime and career. I think like most people my age I made my first websites in notepad (yes the free tool that comes with Windows!) and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools like [Microsoft FrontPage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_FrontPage) and [HoTMetaL Pro](http://www.hotmetalpro.com/). 

> Fun Fact: The first website I was ever paid to build was made using HoTMetaL Pro in the 90's!

Actually thinking back Microsoft even merged FrontPage technology into Microsoft Word and you used to be able to make websites in Word! Wild times I'd forgotten all about that era! 

When I was building the very early sites especially those built in notepad, CSS didn't even exist if I recall correctly. We used inline styles for everything. Then CSS came along and it was fine but over the years as new CSS versions came and browsers advanced it's all gotten more than a little bit complicated to say the least. 

I've never gotten on with frameworks for styling. I used to fight with Bootstrap back in the day until eventually I decided it was much easier and quicker to just write all my own styles, building for mobile first and then overriding at various breakpoints via `@media` queries.

More recently as I've been building my websites with React I've fallen in love with a technology called [styled-components](https://styled-components.com/) which is a popular CSS-in-JS (CSS written in JavaScript) solution. I've used this for a number of projects and whilst it's been a nice developer experience and also very flexible it does come with it's own issues. The libraries add a fair bit of bloat and there are also well known issues such as the loading flicker you see on some websites now. 

Traditionally you'd load all your styles first before rending the page so that the page would be rendered with the correct styles applied. Websites load JavaScript last so if you're using it to style your pages then you're going to see pages loading without the correct styles until the JavaScript catches up.

But even with the issues that CSS-in-JS brings, styled-components have been my favourite way to work for quite some time now.

But now there's a new kid in town. Tailwind CSS.

Tailwind CSS has completely changed how I think about styling AGAIN! On first glance I really wasn't impressed as it looked like a definite step backways. It brought back all those old memories of inline styles. The very thing the industry has moved away from over the last decade or so and taught us is the work of the devil. It also invoked the terrible memories of fighting with the Bootstrap framework. But it's gaining popularity in the industry and design tools like Figma will give you Tailwind classes so you can build the designs and end up with a website that matches 1:1.

So I decided to give it a try and wow am I glad I did.

Let's demonstrate the two approaches by styling a form component.

## Method 1: Styled Components

When building components that I will style with `styled-components` I like to create two files. One for the component code and markup, and another for the styles. Here is the <ContactFormSC> component that will be placed into a web page. 

** Note: I've named it ContactFormSC to denote styled-component. **

`~/src/components/styled-components/contact-form/contact-form.tsx`

```javascript
import type { FC } from "react";

import { 
    ContactFormStyled,
    HeaderOneStyled,
    LabelStyled,
    InputStyled,
    TextAreaStyled,
    ButtonStyled
} from "./contact-form.styled";

const ContactFormSC: FC = () => <ContactFormStyled>
    <HeaderOneStyled row="1">Styled-Components Form</HeaderOneStyled>

    <LabelStyled row="2" placeholder="name">Name:</LabelStyled>
    <InputStyled row="2" />

    <LabelStyled row="3">Email:</LabelStyled>
    <InputStyled row="3" />

    <LabelStyled row="4">Phone:</LabelStyled>
    <InputStyled row="4" />

    <LabelStyled row="5">Message:</LabelStyled>
    <TextAreaStyled row="5"></TextAreaStyled>

    <ButtonStyled row="6">Send</ButtonStyled>
</ContactFormStyled>

export default ContactFormSC
```

This component is importing various styles from the `contact-form.styled` file which I will show below. 

`<ContactFormStyled>` returns a HTML `<form>` with styles applied.

`<HeaderOneStyled>` returns a HTML `<h1>` with styles applied.

`<LabelStyled>` returns a HTML `<label>` with styles applied.

`<InputStyled>` returns a HTML `<input>` with styles applied.

`<TextAreaStyled>` returns a HTML `<textarea>` with styles applied.

`<ButtonStyled>` returns a HTML `<button>` with styles applied.

You will notice each of the elements contained inside the form accept a prop called `row`. This prop is picked up in the styles and used to determine which grid-row the element should be assigned to.

`~/src/components/styled-components/contact-form/contact-form.styled.tsx`

```javascript
import styled from "styled-components";

interface FormComponentProps {
    row: string // used to control the grid row
}

const ContactFormStyled = styled.form`
    display: grid;
    background-color: gray;
    color: black;
    border: white 2px solid;
    border-radius: .5rem;
    grid-template-rows: repeat(7, minmax(0, 1fr));
    padding: 1rem 2rem;
`

const HeaderOneStyled = styled.h1<FormComponentProps>`
    font-size: 2.5rem;
    justify-self: center;
    grid-row: ${ (props) => props.row };
    grid-column: 1 / span 2;
    margin-bottom: 2rem;
    text-transform: uppercase;
`

const LabelStyled = styled.label<FormComponentProps>`
    font-size: 1.1rem;
    grid-row: ${ (props) => props.row };
    margin-right: 1rem;
`

const InputStyled = styled.input<FormComponentProps>`
    border-radius: .25rem;
    color: black;
    padding: .5rem;
    grid-row: ${ (props) => props.row };
    height: 2rem;
`

const TextAreaStyled = styled.textarea<FormComponentProps>`
    border-radius: .25rem;
    color: black;
    padding: .5rem;
    grid-row: ${ (props) => props.row } / span 2;
    height: 8rem;
`

const ButtonStyled = styled.button<FormComponentProps>`
    background-color: blue;
    border-radius: .25rem;
    color: white;
    grid-column: span 2;
    height: 3rem;
    margin-top: 1.5rem;

    :hover {
        background-color: #0c0cef;
        cursor: pointer
    }
`

export {
    ContactFormStyled,
    HeaderOneStyled,
    LabelStyled,
    InputStyled,
    TextAreaStyled,
    ButtonStyled
}
```

I do love this way of working as it does make the code very easy to reason about. We can quickly and easily create re-usable styles in this way as you see with `LabelStyled` and `InputStyled` above. VSCode and JetBrains IDEs also have plugins for styled-components so that syntax highlighting and auto-complete works as if you were writing standard CSS in a regular `.css` file. But it's slightly better than that because if you look at `grid-row` you can see we can even access the props that were passed in. You can use any TypeScript/JavaScript expressions you like in here so it makes it very easy to customise styles based on the code and state contained in your app!  

Finally this is how you would use your `<ContactFormSC>` component in page. For bonus points I defined some styles for the `<main>` component of the page to use to demonstrate how you can do them in a single file.

`~/src/pages/styled-components.tsx`

```javascript
import { type NextPage } from "next";
import styled from "styled-components";
import ContactFormSC from "~/components/styled-components/contact-form/contact-form";

const Home: NextPage = () => {

  const MainStyled = styled.main`
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: column;
    min-height: 100vh;
    width: 100vw;
    align-items: center;
    justify-content: center;
    background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom, red, darkblue);
  `

  return (
    <MainStyled>
        <ContactFormSC />
    </MainStyled>
  );
};

export default Home;
```

## Method 2: Tailwind CSS

With Tailwind the `<ContactFormTW>` component both the component definition and the styles live together in a single file.

`~/src/components/tailwind/contact-form/contact-form.tsx`

```javascript
import type { FC } from "react";

const ContactFormTW: FC = () => {
    return <form className="grid border-white border-2  grid-rows-7 rounded-lg shadow-2xl bg-blue-400 py-4 px-8">
        <h1 className="col-span-2 text-black text-4xl mb-8 justify-self-center py-4 font-sans uppercase">
            Tailwind CSS Form
        </h1>

        <label>Name:</label>
        <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6" />

        <label>Email:</label>
        <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6"/>
        
        <label>Phone:</label>
        <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6"/>

        <label className="pr-4">Message:</label>
        <textarea className="h-20 row-span-2 rounded px-2 self-center"/>
        
        <button onClick={sayHello} className="col-span-2 bg-blue-600 rounded-md h-10 mt-6 hover:h-10 text-white hover:bg-blue-500 hover:text-white" >
            Send
        </button>
    </form>
}

export default ContactFormTW
```

`~/src/pages/tailwind.tsx`

```javascript
import { type NextPage } from "next";
import ContactFormTW from "~/components/tailwind/contact-form/contact-form";

const Home: NextPage = () => {
  return (
    <>
      <main className="flex min-h-screen flex-col items-center justify-center bg-gradient-to-b from-[yellow] to-[darkblue]">
          <ContactFormTW />
      </main>
    </>
  );
};

export default Home;
```

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking what I did. This looks worse. Where is the separation of concerns? Look at that duplication. This looks harder to understand than the styled-components example. 

But it's fine honestly. It's better than fine. It's like a zen-mode for styling. Allow me to explain.

Let's take the `Name`, `Email` and `Phone` labels and input boxes.

```javascript
<label>Name:</label>
<input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6" />

<label>Email:</label>
<input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6"/>

<label>Phone:</label>
<input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6"/>
```

Here we have duplicated the classes 3 times. We've duplicated the following: 

* `h-8` (height: 2rem)
* `rounded` (border-radius: 0.25rem)
* `px-2` (padding-left: .5rem, padding-right: .5rem)
* `mb-6` (margin-bottom: 1.5rem)

If I couldn't live with this duplication and trust me I used to be a "duplication is a bug" type of guy, I could easily create another re-usable component something like this:

```javascript
import type { FC } from "react";

const Input: FC = () => <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6" />

export default Input
```

We could then use this in our `<ContactFormTS>` component. But seems like more trouble than it's worth. It took seconds to write it the first time and live with the duplication. I didn't have to think about anything. All those values are worked out for me by Tailwind. I can literally just type `h-2` and see how it looks in the browser. Then tweak the number and it will just update in real time.  No extra files to think about. No imports. Just quick styling.

All of those values have been worked out and standardised for us by Tailwind. Designers know them or at least design tools like Figma do.

If you break a component down into two halves it makes even more sense why this approach is good. 

Let's add some psuedo-code to our form. 

```javascript
import type { FC } from "react";

const ContactFormTW: FC = () => {

    const msg = "Hello World!";

    const sayHello = () => {
        alert(msg);
    }

    return <form className="grid border-white border-2  grid-rows-7 rounded-lg shadow-2xl bg-blue-400 py-4 px-8">
        <h1 className="col-span-2 text-black text-4xl mb-8 justify-self-center py-4 font-sans uppercase">
            Tailwind CSS Form
        </h1>

        <label>Name:</label>
        <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6" />

        <label>Email:</label>
        <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6"/>
        
        <label>Phone:</label>
        <input className="h-8 rounded px-2 mb-6"/>

        <label className="pr-4">Message:</label>
        <textarea className="h-20 row-span-2 rounded px-2 self-center"/>
        
        <button onClick={sayHello} className="col-span-2 bg-blue-600 rounded-md h-10 mt-6 hover:h-10 text-white hover:bg-blue-500 hover:text-white" >
            Send
        </button>
    </form>
}

export default ContactFormTW
```

Looking at that code now you can see there is two distinct halves of a component. The first half is for logic and state etc. The bottom half is for rendering. That's where the styling code goes to control how the component renders.

So it doesn't matter that we repeat anything and while it might look like inline styles they aren't. These are standardised styling rules that are the same across the entire application. And if that wasn't good enough I've already explained how you can just take any part of the larger component and break it out and encapsulate a part of it into another smaller component so you can remove the duplication if you really must!

Honestly I implore you to try Tailwind. It's my new favourite way to style web apps and I don't think I'll be using anything else after this. 

Once again I've uploaded the code to GitHub so you can download it and play. However I have noticed some strange behaviour in the browser on refreshes which I assume must be something to do with having both Tailwind and styled-components installed into the same project!

Have fun :)

TAILWIND CSS

![LR Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

As you know I've been building modern web apps in React+NextJS for a number of years now. After years of trying different web technologies I finally settled into [React](https://react.dev/) (JavaScript) and [NextJS](https://nextjs.org/) for my frontends and I created separate APIs with [.NET Core](https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/). I would then glue these together making requests via [Axios](https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios). This has been a stack that I was happy with and to be honest the most experimentation I've done has always been with the front-end styling technologies. 

That has all changed recently as I discovered the [T3 Stack](https://create.t3.gg/). I believe the T3 Stack stands for; TypeScript, Tailwind CSS and tRPC.

Over the last month or so I've been building a new website for my company. On this website I need to collect data from users. Originally I had no plans to change my ways and I was expecting I would write a .NET API as usual when I got to this point but today I decided to spike out a little demo project and explore the T3 Stack instead. I'm also going to try out a service called [PlanetScale](https://planetscale.com/) which will allow me to host a serverless database. 

I am writing this post as I go. Today I will build 2x components.

`<ContactForm>` - A simple contact form that allows users to submit data to our PlanetScale database.

`<SubmissionsGrid>` - A simple grid view of sorts showing any rows of data in our PlanetScale database.

For this project I will be using the following technologies: 

* React
* NextJS
* TypeScript
* tRPC
* Prisma
* Tailwind CSS
* PlanetScale 

> I'm am using Tailwind CSS for the new website and I do really love it but I will be publishing a separate post about this tomorrow. I think I'll remove the Tailwind CSS classes from the code I show in this post. - Liam

### Step 1: Create a T3 Stack based project 

At the terminal I ran `npm create t3-app@latest` and chose to install the following:

* prisma
* typescript
* tailwind

### Step 2: Sign up for a free PlanetScale account

I signed up for an account on PlanetScale as I've never used it before. It only took a few mins and once I was in I was prompted to create a new database.

### Step 3: Create a new database

This was as easy as just choosing a name. I chose `contact-form` and selected the AWS Region I wanted the database be located.

### Step 4: Connect to the default branch

At this point I had a single branch called `main`. You can create different branches to match the branches in your git repo but for this today I just stuck with the single branch.

![branch](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/27/01-pscale-branch.png)

I then clicked into the main branch and then hit `connect` as shown below.

![connect](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/27/02-pscale-connect.png)

I chose `Prisma` and clicked `New password` to reveal the password, then copied the full connection string.

![connect options](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/27/03-pscale-connect-options.png)

Next I opened the `~/.env` file in the root of the project and pasted connection string as the value of the environment variable `DATABASE_URL`.

Then I opened the `~/src/env.mjs` file. This file is interesting it uses the popular TypeScript schema validation library [zod](https://github.com/colinhacks/zod) to validate your projects environment variables.

I updated the file in 2x places.

Firstly to add the new values to the server-side variables schema:

```javascript
const server = z.object({
  DATABASE_URL: z.string().url(),
  NODE_ENV: z.enum(["development", "test", "production"])
});
```

> If you're wondering what the block above is doing, it's saying firstly that we expect an environment variable with the name `DATABASE_URL` and that it's both a `string` and it is formatted to be a valid `URL`. And secondly another environment variable named `NODE_ENV` and it must have one of the following values; `development`, `test` or `production`. 

Secondly the `processEnv` block. This validates that the environment variables exist in the current process.

```javascript
const processEnv = {
  DATABASE_URL: process.env.DATABASE_URL,
  NODE_ENV: process.env.NODE_ENV
};
```

Finally I had to tell Prisma how to interact with my PlanetScale database. I located the  `~/prisma/schema.prisma` file and pasted in the following:

```javascript
datasource db {
  provider = "mysql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
  relationMode = "prisma"
}

generator client {
  provider = "prisma-client-js"
}
```

Then just below I created the following `submissions` model (table) to hold my contact form submission data.

```javascript
model submissions {
    id        String    @id @default(cuid())
    name      String    @db.VarChar(255)
    email     String    @db.VarChar(255)
    phone     String?   @db.VarChar(255)
    message   String    @db.VarChar(255)
    createdAt DateTime  @default(now())
    updatedAt DateTime  @updatedAt
}
```

All that was left then was to sync the schema with PlanetScale. 

```bash
npx prisma db push
```

Success!

```bash
Environment variables loaded from .env
Prisma schema loaded from prisma/schema.prisma
Datasource "db": MySQL database "contact-form" at "eu-west.connect.psdb.cloud"

🚀  Your database is now in sync with your Prisma schema. Done in 861ms

✔ Generated Prisma Client (4.11.0 | library) to ./node_modules/@prisma/client in 36ms
```

I could then see in PlanetScale my empty table!

![table](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/27/04-pscale-table.png)

### Step 5: Build an app!

I created a component called `<ContactForm>` and I placed it `~/src/components/forms/contact/contact-form.tsx`

In this file I placed the following code to write up some basic state.

```javascript
import React, { useState } from "react";

interface ContactFormProps {
    title: string // just a title for now but could be extended to make form configurable
}

const ContactForm = ({ title }: ContactFormProps) => {
  // set up some state which will be mutated when typing into the form fields
  const [name, setName] = useState("");
  const [email, setEmail] = useState("");
  const [phone, setPhone] = useState("");
  const [message, setMessage] = useState("");

  // event handler for when the form data is submitted
  const collectData = (e: React.FormEvent<HTMLFormElement>) => {
      e.preventDefault();

      // TODO: grab values from state and send to PlanetScale

      // reset the state to clear the form
      setName("")
      setEmail("")
      setPhone("")
      setMessage("")
  }

    return <form 
                id="contact-form" 
                onSubmit={collectData} >
        <h1>{title}</h1>

        <label>Name:</label>
        <input 
            id="name" 
            value={ name } 
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => setName(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="full name"
        />

        <label>Email:</label>
        <input 
            id="email" 
            value= { email }
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => setEmail(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="email address"
        />
        
        <label>Phone:</label>
        <input 
            id="phone" 
            value= { phone }
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => setPhone(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="phone"
        />

        <label className="pr-4">Message:</label>
        <textarea 
            id="message" 
            value= { message }
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLTextAreaElement>) => setMessage(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="message/query"
        />
        
        <button type="submit">Send</button>
    </form>
}

export default ContactForm
```

The next thing I had to do was create a tRPC procedure that talked to Prisma so we could interact with the database.

I created a tRPC Router called `contactSubmissionsRouter` here: `~/src/server/api/routers/contact-submissions.ts`.

```javascript
import { z } from "zod";

import { createTRPCRouter, publicProcedure } from "~/server/api/trpc";

export const contactSubmissionsRouter = createTRPCRouter({
  add: publicProcedure
  .input(z.object({ 
    name: z.string().min(1).max(255),
    email: z.string().min(1).max(255),
    phone: z.string().min(1).max(255),
    message: z.string().min(1).max(255)}))
  .mutation(async ({ ctx, input }) => {
     await ctx.prisma.submissions.create({
        data: input
    });
  })
});
```

What I have declared here is a single public procedure or route called `add`. It uses `zod` to validate the input and we basically describe an object schema that matches our database table. This procedure is a mutation rather than a query as it's storing data, and you see it takes the input and passes it to Prisma to store. Prisma then sends this directly to our database in PlanetScale.

Before we can use this `contactSubmissionsRouter` we need to update 1 more file which is `~/src/server/api/root.ts`.

```javascript
import { createTRPCRouter } from "~/server/api/trpc";
import { contactSubmissionsRouter } from "./routers/contact-submissions";

/**
 * This is the primary router for your server.
 *
 * All routers added in /api/routers should be manually added here.
 */
export const appRouter = createTRPCRouter({
  submissions: contactSubmissionsRouter
});

// export type definition of API
export type AppRouter = typeof appRouter;
```

Here we are just passing out contact submission router but we can pass any number of different routers here.

Now back to the `<ContactForm>` component. I updated the code to use the new tRPC router. 

First I added a new import to the top of the file: `~/src/components/forms/contact/contact.ts`

```javascript
import { api } from "~/utils/api";
```

Then I added the following just after where we initialised the state.

```javascript
// get a reference to our tRPC mutation for adding submissions
// this will be used later when data is submitted
const addSubmission = api.submissions.add.useMutation();
```

Then I updated the `collectData()` method and added the following:

```javascript
// pass the current state values to our addSubmission procedure 
// on our tRPC router 
addSubmission.mutate({
    name, 
    email, 
    phone,
    message
});
```

The complete file now reads like this.

```javascript
import React, { useState } from "react";
import { api } from "~/utils/api";

interface ContactFormProps {
    title: string
}

const ContactForm = ({ title }: ContactFormProps) => {

    // set up some state which will be mutated when typing into the form fields
    const [name, setName] = useState("");
    const [email, setEmail] = useState("");
    const [phone, setPhone] = useState("");
    const [message, setMessage] = useState("");

    // get a reference to our tRPC mutation for adding submissions
    // this will be used later when data is submitted
    const addSubmission = api.submissions.add.useMutation();

    // event handler for when the form data is submitted
    const collectData = (e: React.FormEvent<HTMLFormElement>) => {
        e.preventDefault();

        // pass the current state values to our addSubmission procedure 
        // on our tRPC router 
        addSubmission.mutate({
            name, 
            email, 
            phone,
            message
        });

        // reset the state to clear the form
        setName("")
        setEmail("")
        setPhone("")
        setMessage("")
    }

    return <form onSubmit={collectData}>
        <h1>{title}</h1>

        <label>Name:</label>
        <input 
            id="name" 
            value={ name } 
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => setName(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="full name"
        />

        <label>Email:</label>
        <input 
            id="email" 
            value= { email }
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => setEmail(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="email address"
        />
        
        <label>Phone:</label>
        <input 
            id="phone" 
            value= { phone }
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLInputElement>) => setPhone(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="phone"
        />

        <label className="pr-4">Message:</label>
        <textarea 
            id="message" 
            value= { message }
            onChange={(e: React.ChangeEvent<HTMLTextAreaElement>) => setMessage(e.target.value)} 
            placeholder="message/query"
        />
        
        <button type="submit">Send</button>
    </form>
}

export default ContactForm
```

Now I filled in the form and hit Send and success! Data arrives in PlanetScale!

![data](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/27/05-pscale-data.png)

That's pretty awesome! But it's a pain having to switch tabs in my browser to query the data so I want it in my app on the same screen.

So first I went back to the `contactSubmissionsRouter` in `~/src/server/api/routers/contact-submissions.ts` and I added a new route called `getAll`.

```javascript
getAll: publicProcedure
  .query(({ ctx }) => {
      return ctx.prisma.submissions.findMany();
  })
```

A bit more simple this one no input to validate. It simply fetches all data from our `submissions` table.

So next I created another new component called `<SubmissionsGrid>` which lives: `~/src/components/submission-grid/submission-grid.tsx`.

```javascript
import { api } from "~/utils/api";

const SubmissionGrid = () => {
    
    const { data } = api.submissions.getAll.useQuery();
    
    return <div>
        <h1>Contact Form Submissions:</h1>
        
        <div>
            <div>
                <span>NAME</span>
                <span>EMAIL ADDRESS</span>
                <span>PHONE</span>
                <span>MESSAGE</span>
            </div>
            {
                data?.map(submission => <div key={submission.id}>
                    <span>{submission.name}</span>
                    <span>{submission.email}</span>
                    <span>{submission.phone}</span>
                    <span>{submission.message}</span>
                </div>)
            }
        </div>
    </div>
}

export default SubmissionGrid
```

This time we use the `getAll` route of our api which is a `Query` rather than a `Mutation` and then we simple loop through the rows of data and display them in a grid. Remember I've taken out all of the Tailwind CSS styling rules in the code above.

Finally add both of these components to the `index.tsx` page.

```javascript
import { type NextPage } from "next";
import Head from "next/head";
import ContactForm from "~/components/forms/contact/contact";
import SubmissionGrid from "~/components/submission-grid/submission-grid";

const Home: NextPage = () => {

  return (
    <>
      <Head>
        <title>Liams Contact Form</title>
        <meta name="description" content="Contact Form Demo" />
      </Head>
      <main>
        <ContactForm title="Contact Us" />
        <SubmissionGrid />
      </main>
    </>
  );
};

export default Home;
```

And it looks like this.

![ui](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/27/06-pscale-ui.png)

It really is quite incredible the technology that we have these days for building modern web apps. Because it's TypeScript and thanks to tRPC and Zod we have a delightful developer experience, you know immediately when something is wrong. All the types are infered right through the stack. You can command+click anywhere in the code in the front-end to be taken to the back-end. It's just a dream. 

Never have I enjoyed developing web apps as much as I do now with all this tech and this amazing T3 stack!

---

EDIT: I've created a new github account to share any code that is produced for blog posts. 

You can download the complete code for this project [here](https://github.com/liam-reilly-info/typescript-trpc-prisma-planetscale-contact-form)

Building a Contact Form with tRPC, Prisma and PlanetScale

![Stood infront of the UFC letters](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/00-ufc.jpeg)

Last July I took my lad to the UFC event in London and we had the best weekend of our lives. It was for his 16th birthday and I guess also a little bit for mine considering I turned 40 a couple of months later, so we spared no expense and had an amazing weekend. 

We enjoyed being at the UFC event so much I knew if I ever got the chance again we would have to come back and see another live event. Then sometime later the UFC announced that they were not only coming back again to do another event but they were coming back to host one of their monthly Pay Per View events. The numbered cards that are reserved for the biggest fights. The world championship fights and not only that but we had a freshly minted British world champion now in Leon Edwards who would be heading up the main event in a grudge rematch against "The Nigerian Nightmare" Kamaru Usman.

So we did it again! 

We stayed in the same hotel as last time. We even ate the same meal when we arrived. The Hells Kitchen burger at [Gordon Ramseys Street Burger](https://www.gordonramsayrestaurants.com/en/uk/street-burger/locations/the-o2?url=/street-burger/the-o2/) restaurant.

![Hells Kitchen Burger](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/01-burger.jpeg)

It was nobody's birthday this time around though so we replaced the extravagant Saturday afternoon [Gaucho](https://gauchorestaurants.com/restaurants/o2-arena/) steak with with a more modest pizza offering from Kitchen Pizzeria.

![Kitchen Pizzeria](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/02-pizza.jpeg)

As this was a bigger UFC event than the last time there was a bit more going on during the day leading up to the fight. We got to stand off against our chosen fighters*

![Callum Face-off](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/03-face-off-c.jpeg)
![Liam Face-off](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/04-face-off-l.jpeg)

> I chose Justin Gaethje but the machine gave me Kamaru Usman anyway. The man said Kamura was the most popular choice that day. Yeah no doubt, the machines are as broken as a US election voting machines.

We also got to pose with the championship belts! 

![Callum Belt](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/05-belt-c.jpeg)
![Liam Belt](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/06-belt-l.jpeg)

They also had a bunch of fighter meet & greets on but the queues for those were insane. Callums just like me in that regard. As much as it would be cool to meet the fighters, we wouldn't queue that long to see anyone! 

We had a really great time again. There is nothing I enjoy more in this world than taking my boy to the UFC and spending the weekend with him. I thought the event itself felt like it was a little flat compared to last time. I didn't get the same energy from the crowd and it didn't seem to have the same party atmosphere as last time. I didn't drink any alcohol the entire weekend this time where as I was drinking all day the last time we went. I wondered if this was the reason but Callum said he agreed with me that the crowd just wasn't as good as last time.

The results weren't as exciting either, pretty much all went to decisions but our British world champion Leon put on a master class and is still the world champion so that was a good way to end the event!

![Event Picture](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/26/07-red.jpeg)

I think that's going to be the last UFC event in London for us for a while at least. I want to try an event in a different country next time!

UFC 286


![WARP Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/10/00-cover.jpg)

I've been using [WARP](https://www.warp.dev/) as my full-time terminal for a couple of months now. I wrote a quick 
[post](/blog/post/warp) about it when I first started so I thought I would write a quick follow-up post now that I've
used it more.

Back in January the thought of changing my daily terminal never even entered my head. Then I came across WARP and 
decided to give it a try and I love it! I can't see me ever going back.

Let me tell you about a few of the things I have come to love.

## Blocks

Anyone that spends any amount of time on the command line knows the pain of executing a command and then watching
it spew pages and pages of output into the terminal window, only to then have to scroll back through it trying to find 
the beginning. 

WARP solves for this by grouping the output of each command you execute into it's own block. 

You can move from 1 command block to the next as easily and hitting the up/down arrows. You can right-click a block
to get access to a wealth of handy commands 

![context menu for a command block](/assets/images/blog/2023/03/10/01-block-context.png)

One interesting option there is `Create Permalink` which allows you to share the output with someone else, which could 
be very useful whilst debugging issues. 

> I would advise care with this feature though. It does upload the command and resulting output to Warp and is available
> to anyone with the link. You can however un-share any shared code blocks in the settings menu.

One other feature I particularly like with blocks is Search. You can easily search within a specific block rather than 
all terminal output. Neat!

## Autocomplete

The autocomplete is so good it feels like it reads my mind most of the time. As you type commands it uses your history
to make suggestions but it goes much further. It understands many commands and even the arguments and will pop them up 
as suggestions along with explanations of what each option does. It's so nice. 

## Input 

Typing commands in WARP is a much nicer experience than any other terminal I have ever used. It's essentially a modern 
text editor so things like cursor positioning, multiple cursors, selection, copy and paste etc all work just how you'd 
expect in any other application. No more strange characters and beeps when you try to go back and fix a typo!

## Launch Configuration

Finally a terminal that remembers what I was working on and persists things across sessions! It remembers how I
had my terminal windows split, and which directories i was in. The time this saves must add up!

## Speed 

It's so fast.

## AI Command Search

I admit I haven't needed to use this often so far but it is a nice feature to have for when you can't quite remember a 
command or its options. Being able to type in roughly what you want in pain English and have it spit back a fully 
formed command is awesome! It's currently powered by GPT-3 and doesn't always work but I am sure this will continue to 
improve overtime with GPT-4 around the corner.


## The Devs

Finally I want to mention and give props to the devs. When I first started using WARP I left some feedback and reported
a minor gripe I had (not being able to dismiss the big Red banner when a new update was available). Not only did I 
receive a reply from the devs within days but it was also fixed and released in the very next update!

If you haven't given WARP a try yet. What are you waiting for? It's great!

WARP! - Revisited

![LR Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

I wasn't sure I was going to post anything this month as I have spent most of my time working on projects that I can't 
actually talk about but when I had a look back over my notes I realised I did actually manage to squeeze a couple of 
cool things in on my personal website.

## WEEK 1

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* I created an automated bot that is triggered during deployment of the website, to post alerts to Mastodon whenever a new blog post has been published.
* I added a new Unread Books sub-section to the Books section of the website.
* I published a blog post about the new Unread Books feature, explaining that it shows all the books that are sitting on my bookshelf that I haven't yet got to reading!

**Fun Fact: I started to build a bot to post to Twitter as well and Elon Musk decided that exact day to announce they were taking away free API access and hiding behind a Twitter Blue paywall!**

## WEEK 2

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* Published a blog post about Hip-Pop Kombucha!
* Updated website to include Open Graph meta tags for improved sharing on Twitter.

## WEEK 3

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* I created an 8-bit retro version of the home page which is hosted on Neocities and links back to the main site.
* I published a blog post about the Neocities home page.
* I published a blog post about KeePassXC and it's integration with `ssh-agent`.

## WEEK 4

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* I added a fun little animation to the logo in the header.
* I published the B-BLOG! (Braggadocious Blog) update for Febrary.

## BONUS 

* I did another month without touching alcohol. This included a couple of contractor lunches with friends and even a friends party which I took a couple of alcohol free beers to! Who even am I anymore?!
* I read 4 books! 
* I continued to meditate daily, but I confess I did miss 1 day this month.
* I learned how to make biscuits! I baked cookies and even chocolate digestives. This is me finding ways to cut down my sugar consumption. If I want a biscuit then I have to make them myself! It worked for pizza!

All in all another very good month. I feel great, I've stuck to my plan and I'm getting lots done. I just can't 
believe we're already heading into March! But I'm very excited that we are because some fun things are happening in 
March which I'm sure I'll post about in the coming weeks!

BRAGGADOCIOUS BLOG! - FEB

![KeePassXC Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/18/00-cover.png)

I've been using KeePassXC to manage passwords for a number of years now. It's simple, secure and open-source! It works 
offline, it's cross-platform, so it works across my different devices and operating systems and it's rich in features. 

I don't actually even use all the features, for example I don't use any of the browser integration features. Personally 
I just don't feel comfortable giving browsers that level of access to my password manager, I'd rather copy+paste the 
passwords myself each time. But that's just me, if you aren't quite as paranoid as me then you might appreciate these 
features.

In my line of work I have to manage many different [SSH Keys](https://www.ssh.com/academy/ssh-keys) (Secure Shell) and 
as per best practice I protect each of these keys with a password which I have been storing safely in KeePassXC. Much 
like how I manage my normal passwords I have been copying the password for each key from KeePassXC and then pasting into 
my terminal when adding the key to [SSH Agent](https://www.ssh.com/academy/ssh/agent).  

Today I decided to finally have a look into the `SSH Agent Integration` features built into KeePassXC and man do I wish I 
had done this sooner! By enabling the SSH Agent Integration features we can configure KeePassXC to automatically add our
SSH key(s) to the SSH Agent whenever the KeePassXC database is opened, and we can have it automatically remove the key(s)
again when the database is closed or locked. No more cutting and pasting passwords or leaving key(s) exposed.

Keep reading to see how this works.

## Step 1: Create an SSH Key.

Create an SSH Key using the `ssh-keygen` command. Example: 

```bash
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "keepassxc.ssh-agent.demo@liam-reilly.info"
```

This command will generate a set of key files (public and private) and will ask you where to store them. The default will
be a hidden `.ssh` folder inside your users `~/` (home) directory. You will also be given the opportunity to protect the key
with a password which must be entered when attempting to use the key, or when adding the key to the `ssh-agent`.

For this example I named my key: `id_ed25519.demo`. I wrote my key to the directory: `/Users/liam/Desktop/demo/ssh`.
I used the internets favourite password: `correct horse battery staple`. 

[If this password seems strange to you please read this](https://xkcd.com/936/).

I now have the following private and public key files:

```bash
id_ed25519.demo
id_ed25519.demo.pub
```

## Step 2: Enable the SSH Agent Integration in KeePassXC 

In KeePassXC option the Preferences page and find the SSH Agent tab. Tick the option `Enable SSH Agent Integration` and 
click `OK`.

![enable ssh agent](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/18/01-enable-agent.png)

## Step 3: Add a record to KeePassXC database for your SSH Key.

The `Password` field is the important field here and this should match the password you used to protect your SSH key. 
In this example `correct horse battery staple`.

Feel free to enter any other detail you find useful such as a `title` or `username`. Here I just matched to those found
inside the key.

![add record](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/18/02-new-record.png)

## Step 4: Enable SSH Agent for this record. 

This is where we link the KeePassXC record to the SSH Key we generated above. Enter the path to the private key you 
generated earlier. 

In my case: `/Users/liam/Desktop/demo/ssh/id/id_ed25519.demo`

If you enter the path correctly should see some information about the key displayed (`fingerprint`, `comment`,`public 
key`).

You will notice I have also ticked the 2 check boxes at the top of the screen. 

`Add key to agent when database is opened/unlocked`

`Remove key from agent when database is closed/locked`

If you would rather not have this behaviour leave them unticked. You can add/remove keys manually. I will show this next.

![enable ssh](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/18/03-enable-ssh.png)

Once you are happy click `OK` and you are done!

## Step 5: Add SSH key to SSH Agent

If you ticked the option above to add your key automatically when the database is opened and unlocked then you can simply
close KeePassXC and re-open and you should find your key is now loaded into `ssh-agent`. If you did not choose to have
this automatic integration simply right-click the record in KeePassXC and click the option `Add key to SSH Agent`

![manual-add](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/18/04-manual-add.png)

Now using the terminal enter the command `ssh-add -L` and you should see your key.

## Step 6: Remove SSH key from SSH Agent

If you ticked the option above to remove your key automatically when the database is closed/locked then you can simply 
close KeePassXC and run the command `ssh-add -L` again and you should see your key is no longer loaded.

Alternatively to remove the key manually right-click the record in KeePassXC and click the option 
`Remove key from SSH Agent`.

![manual-remove](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/18/05-manual-remove.png)

---
I wish I had bothered to learn this sooner. This is such a great bit of functionality. A real win-win. It's easier for 
us as we no longer have to think about manually managing SSH Keys day to day, and it's so much better from a security 
perspective. If you take advantage of the automatic adding/removing of keys when the database is locked/unlocked then 
no longer are SSH keys exposed by simply being left in the SSH Agent. They are removed from the agent and we have to 
make a conscious effort to unlock our database before the SSH keys can be used again. 

Remember this is just another additional layer of security which can be combined with other KeePassXC security features 
such as `Key Files` and/or `Hardware Keys` such as Yubikey.

I hope others can find this useful and have the same "OMG why didn't I do this sooner?" moment that I had today!

KEEPASSXC - SSH AGENT

![Screenshot of retro version of the home page](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/14/00-cover.png)

About a year ago I stumbled across Neocities, a revival of Geocities. Instantly I had this dumb idea that I wanted to 
replicate my entire website and mirror it on Neocities only I wanted to build it in pure HTML/CSS back like the old days.
I wanted it to look like an old website that might have been created back in the glory days.

I sat on the idea for about year because well a few reasons... 

- It's dumb. 
- I'm very busy with real work. 
- It's dumb.

But for whatever reason the idea just wouldn't go away. So tonight I decided to just do it! I did scale back my grand 
plans. I have simply rebuilt the home page. I've pixelated the logos and used a 8-bit retro style font. All the links
redirect you to the real website. 

It's stupid, it took me a couple of hours. But it was fun and I love it! 😂

Retro Baby!

![HIP POP](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/12/00-cover-hip-pop.png)

As I type this it's been 42 days (6 weeks) since I last had a drop of Alcohol! When I'm at home I usually drink Water 
(3 Litres each day), and Matcha Green Tea in the morning and Milkshakes (Nesquick) in the evening. I do also have my 
Chia Seed and Cacao Powder Milkshake for Breakfast each day and throughout the day I will squeeze fresh Oranges/Lemons/Limes
into Water if I want a fruit juice. As you can see I have enough variety in my drinks not to get to bored, but sometimes
we want a treat or something different. For me this used to be Beer or Wine, Lager or IPA. 

I would often drink beers to relax and unwind in the evening after I finished work. But now that I'm not drinking, I've found
that I was replacing my Alcoholic drinks with Coca Cola/Pepsi or Coffee. I quickly realised I was consuming far too much 
Sugar and Caffeine so I started to look around for healthier alternatives. I found some decent options in Marks and 
Spencer including a nice Apple and Grape drink that's not as bad as Coke but still not great! 

Last week I was watching a video on Kombucha and it's many health benefits and I thought I might try some next time I go 
shopping. In a weird twist of fate a couple of days later I randomly came across [Hip Pop](https://drinkhippop.com/)! Hip Pop are 
a small family-run brewery business based in Altrincham that produce amazing Kombucha and Living Soda drinks. These are
healthy fermented drinks that contain living cultures, enzymes and acids that are good for you, good for your gut, 
and contain no artificial sugars or other preservatives.

They come in loads of awesome flavours, in some sweet looking cans that look the business and I think are reasonably priced! 
I placed my first order for 24 cans on Thursday night and it was delivered to my door on Saturday afternoon! I tried my first can 
(Apple and Elderflower) Saturday evening and it was lovely! I'm looking forward to trying the others now and I know I will
be ordering a crate of these every month going forward as I stopped eating the pro-biotic Activia Yoghurts that I used 
to like when they started adding artificial sweeteners! Not cool :(

I highly recommend Hip Pop if you are interested in trying Kombucha or their Living Soda drinks. They sell taster packs
if you just want to try or you can buy in 6, 12 or 24 packs, and if you use my link below you will get £10 off your first
order! 

HIP POP

![Books](/assets/images/blog/2023/02/04/00-cover.png)

The image above shows eleven books. These are all books that I was lucky to receive as presents this past Christmas. One 
evening I was sat looking the books piled up next to the TV and it got me thinking about how long it is going to take me
to read those books. From here I started to think about which order to read these books, and then this led me to think 
but what about the other books I plan to read, that are sat on my bookshelf upstairs!

I went upstairs and did a quick scan over the books on the bookshelf and I realised I have a lot of reading to do! I 
have a habit of buying books as soon as I come across them if I have an interest in reading them. I have been collecting
new books far faster than I have been able to read them, and I'm reading for at least an hour a day usually two hours!

As I was looking at the books on the shelf I kept saying to myself "oh I forgot about that one". I then realised I had
to do something. 

So today I build a new feature for my website. In the books section there is now a new toggle that let's you switch
between the books I have already read and commented on, and the unread books that are sat on my 
shelf. 

You can view my unread books [here](/books/unread).

It turns out I currently have thirty-one unread books and this doesn't even include some computing books that I have sat on the 
shelf that are currently also unread. There about another ten of those!

Which book on my unread list would you read first? Let me know!

Unread Books!

![LR Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

One thing I've never really enjoyed during my career is keeping track of things I've been working on. I'm very much a 
do-er and I like to just jump into things and start doing. I like to lose myself in the task at hand, the problem I am 
solving and the code I am working on. 

I always hated it whenever I was asked for a progress update or a report at the end of the week or worse, the end of the 
month, listing all the things I'd worked on or delivered recently. Sure you can get this information in my line of work,
usually from the Kanban board or whatever but I never wanted to "waste" the time (that's
how I saw it) looking backwards at the things I'd moved on from and often already forgotten about!

I think I've come to realise that this was a mistake. I was framing it all wrong. One of the big problems in my industry
is burnout. It can often feel like we're hamsters on a wheel expected to just keep sprinting week after week, feature
after feature, with very little celebration for what we have done. I know I have personally suffered from burnout 
recently. 

The answer I think has been staring me in the face all this time and I actually need to credit [Parul Singh](https://www.linkedin.com/in/theadhdtechrecruiter/)
with the original idea. I was reading her post on LinkedIn about her "Brag Doc" which she's using the keep track of everything
she's gotten done, because in her own words; "sometimes it doesn't feel like much!". This resonated with me hard! 

We do so many things day to day and not everything is planned in and visible on a board somewhere. Things happen and we 
get drawn into things and these de-rail other things and before you know it you've failed to deliver something when you 
expected and the reasons why often get forgotten. Whilst it might not be a serious problem on the surface, afterall bosses 
accept the explanation for why things are behind schedule, it can be very damaging subconsciously and very demotivating. 

So I decided I'd take this idea and run with it. I'd flip my hatred of progress tracking and reports on its head and make
a few quick notes week by week of things I'd worked on and preferably completed. Then at anytime when I felt like I was 
not making progress as quickly as I'd have liked, or was just feeling a little stressed out I could take a look back and
remind myself what I'd actually achieved in the previous few weeks and months. 

So without further ado here's my BRAGGADOCIOS BLOG update for January 2023. 

## WEEK 1

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* I updated my website to support 2023 in both the blog and books section.
* I published a blog post about my goals for 2023.
* I created a new component for my blog that suggests other blog posts to read.
* I signed up for a ko-fi account and created a component for my blog that let's people click through to support the blog.

## WEEK 2

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* I added comments (mini reviews) to each of the books I've read that are listed on the website.
* Published a blog post about Chia seed milkshakes and the health benefits.
* Published a blog post about YouTube #shorts and how to hide them in your web browser.

### PROJECT: [St Chads Primary School Website](https://www.stchadsce.cheshire.sch.uk/cheshire/primary/stchads/)

* I worked with the Governors of the school to help improve their existing website including:
  * Fixing navigation issues across mobile devices.
  * Addition of new content pages.

# WEEK 3

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* Published a blog post about the WARP terminal. 
* Finalised new Logo for the website and to be used across social media and other platforms. (I was actually working on this logo for the previous couple of weeks too)

### PROJECT: Alchemist Labs

* Configured new external backup solution for critical company data.
* Payroll improvements in accounting software.
* Tax returns.

# WEEK 4

### PROJECT: www.liam-reilly.info

* Fixed a couple small bugs such as the new blog post suggestion component sometimes offering the same post twice.
* Major re-styling of the website to fix some display bugs and to also improve aesthetics on larger displays.
* Added full theme support to the website including light and dark themes which default based on your OS settings and then persist across sessions for future visits.

## BONUS 

* I went to the cinema. I ate out in restaurants and bars. I caught up with friends. 
* I didn't drink any alcohol and found that surprisingly easy.
* I closed my 3 rings on my Apple Watch meaning I kept to my targets for calories burned, exercise minutes completed and stand hours each day.
* I read 2x books.
* I meditated every morning for a minimum of 20 minutes.
* I published the very first B-BLOG! (Braggadocious Blog)
* Cooked and ate my first ever Lasagne. 40 years old and I tried Lasagne for the first time yesterday! 🙃

So all in all I got quite a few things got done in January! If you'd asked me off the top of my head what I'd done I'd probably have said
designed a new logo for my website! But the reality is I did so much more and this should be celebrated. Instead of feeling
like I've not achieved much I instead feel like a super-hero and I'm excited to see how much more I can get done in the weeks
and months ahead!

I'm going to keep this habit up every week this year and if it's worth mentioning I might continue to publish updates 
like this at the end of each month. I am expecting to be tied up doing a lot more day to day client work though so might
not be worth publishing but will still be good for me to remind myself just how hard I am working when it feels like 
nothing much is happening! 


BRAGGADOCIOUS BLOG! - JAN

![LR Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/26/00-cover.jpg)

For years now humans have been able to live and roam freely. Polluting and destroying to their hearts content. 
They have done so whilst living with delusions that they are needed by the powerful elites, and they foolishly believed 
that their Governments loved them and were there to protect them and make their lives better.

This delusion has been allowed to continue because ironically it's kinda true, but just not in the way you may have 
thought!

You see what powerful elites and ever expanding, greedy, wasteful and corrupt Governments have needed more than anything
up to this point is your money. They've needed you to continue to feed them your money and they've needed you to work 
hard and break your backs until you literally cannot work anymore and die. They were playing for time whilst they (or 
should that be you) perfected the new worker drones/tax slaves 2.0. Robots and A.I.

Now with the advent of ChatGPT it should be clear to see that tax slaves 2.0 technology is basically here, and tax 
drones 1.0 with their problematic ideas of fairness, and ever-growing list of requirements and entitlements such as fair 
pay for honest work are no longer needed. Surplus to requirements you might say.

## Here's why that is a good thing!

No longer will humans be required to work to live, only to cruelly die at the end when they can no longer function to 
their previous levels. Now thanks to A.I. humans can miss out the work part entirely and just skip ahead to the die part. 
Think about it; no more 6AM alarm clocks! No more busy roads or packed trams to contend with in the morning! No more 
worrying that wages aren't keeping up with inflation and wondering how we might feed our families in the morning. 

All that is over! We're all about to be "let-go" as it were.

What a time to be alive! Or is that dead? Well you know what I mean... 


WHY CHAT-GPT TAKING YOUR JOB IS A GOOD THING!

![LR Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

# Themes are here! 

I'm not sure how I forgot to publish an update about this but the website now has theme support! There is a light theme
and a dark theme and the website will default to your operating system preferences. You can toggle between the light 
and dark themes by clicking on the new lightbulb/half moon icons in the top-right hand corner of the website header.

I've only added a light and dark theme at this time but it would be quite simple to add more themes. If you would like
to see different themes let me know and I'll add them.

If you're interested your selected theme choice is stored in your browser under **local storage**, the key: **theme**. 
This ensures that on returning visits your choice of theme will be remembered providing you haven't cleared your browser
data.

THEMES ARE HERE

![Fancy New Logo](/assets/images/open-graph/og-cover-trans.png)

This website has existed in some form since the 22nd of March 2018. In all that time I've never had a logo. Well not a
proper logo anyway. What I did was create a quick image in GIMP. A simple square and put the text LR and INFO inside it
and that was that. I added it to the site assets and it's been displayed all over the place ever since. Well no more! 
I have finally made a proper logo for the website! 

Whilst I was at it I realised that I was getting quite tired of looking at the website as visually it's not changed much 
at all in all those years so I've also made a few tweaks here and there to give the site a little bit of a fresher
look.

I've added a couple of little features throughout the site as well. For example comments for each of the books that I've 
read now appear on each book card on the [books](/books) page. 

I've also added a suggestion box to the bottom of the [blog](/blog/post/fancy) post page that offers up two other 
random blog posts to read.

I've updated the [contact](/contact) page too, adding in a new ways to connect with me via a couple of Mastodon instances that I 
have now joined. 

Oh and I also singed up for [ko-fi.com](https://ko-fi.com/liamreilly) so that if you enjoy my posts you can if you choose
now donate a couple quid and buy me a coffee. Of course this is completely optional you don't have to buy me a coffee, 
but if you do it will be appreciated :) 

Oh you fancy huh?


![WARP Logo](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/16/00-cover.jpg)

# Wanna hear about a cool new tech tool I found that isn't ChatGPT? 😛

In my line of work I spend an enormous amount of time typing commands into a terminal emulator. I have a couple of 
different favourites based on which Operating System I'm using at the time.

On Mac OS it's [iTerm 2](https://iterm2.com/) 

On Linux it's [Terminator](https://gnome-terminator.org/)

On Windows it's [Cmder](https://cmder.app/)

But wait, there's a new kid in town and it's pretty nifty! Enter [Warp](https://www.warp.dev/)

Warp is as they say on their website "a terminal for the 21'st century". It's a completely new terminal application 
built using Rust. It's not another web app based on Electron, forced to look like a desktop app. It's a true native app
and because of this it's blazing fast too!

Now I know there are plenty of existing terminal apps, I mean I've listed 3 of them here already so why should we care 
that there is a new one?

Well this one has some pretty unique features like A.I. for a start! You can type things into Warp in natural language 
and it will convert it into actual commands automatically using GPT-3, it's pretty cool. 

Aside from the A.I. features there are some other nice ones I've noticed so far, things like; it has multiple cursor support to 
input into multiple lines at once, and a cool kind of intelli-sense / auto-complete when typing. It's really good at 
suggesting things as you type based on your history.

Oh and it has theme support! Dracula theme is ready and available from the get-go! 

I will definitely be using this more in the coming weeks and months and I'll probably write a more in-depth review of it 
down the line. 

Until then give it a try for yourselves.

---
EDIT: I forgot about this but it's worth mentioning because it's something that I DO NOT LIKE. 

When you first install Warp it has telemetry enabled by default. If like me you are uncomfortable with telemetry being
enabled you can disable it in the app settings. 

![Settings](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/16/01-settings.png)

WARP!


![uBlock Origin Logo](https://ublockorigin.com/img/uBlock-Origin.svg)

## Have you been annoyed by YouTube Shorts? 

I'm not sure when it happened but at some point over the last few years Big Tech companies decided that being original 
and different was no longer important. As each different Big Tech company launches a new product or feature it's usually
about 2 weeks before every other platform has launched an identical copy of said feature.

YouTube has recently done this, copying Tik-Tok to launch YouTube #shorts. 

Now I wouldn't necessarily mind this, sure offer people a choice do they want long videos or short videos? I suspect most
kids these days would opt for the short version being that we've successfully eroded their concentration spans to about 
20 seconds at best. But I'm 40. I'm old school and made of sterner stuff. I actually still quite enjoy long form video. 
Not to brag, but I can actually still read long form articles and even books! 

So what is my issue with YouTube launching #shorts?  

The problem is there is no option to opt-out of this feature. If you're like me, you will have a big list of channel 
subscriptions which you'll regularly look at to view the latest uploads to choose something to watch next. You can't
easily do this anymore as the subscriptions list is now littered with junk #shorts video clips and it sucks.

Thankfully I've found a work-around.

If you use a browser extension called uBlock Origin (if you don't you really should) you can add filters to remove YouTube #shorts.
To update your filters go to the uBlock Origin Preferences and click the My Filters tab, and then paste in the following:

```javascript
www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-renderer a.yt-simple-endpoint path[d^="M10 14.65v-5.3L15 12l-5 2.65zm7.77-4.33c-.77-.32-1.2-.5-1.2-.5L18"]:upward(ytd-guide-entry-renderer)
www.youtube.com##ytd-mini-guide-renderer a.yt-simple-endpoint path[d^="M10 14.65v-5.3L15 12l-5 2.65zm7.77-4.33c-.77-.32-1.2-.5-1.2-.5L18"]:upward(ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer)
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse #dismissible ytd-rich-grid-slim-media[is-short]:upward(ytd-rich-section-renderer)
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] ytd-rich-item-renderer:has(.ytd-thumbnail[href^="/shorts/"])
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-grid-video-renderer:has(.ytd-thumbnail[href^="/shorts/"])
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer:has(.ytd-thumbnail[href^="/shorts/"])
www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-compact-video-renderer:has(.ytd-thumbnail[href^="/shorts/"])
www.youtube.com##ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-renderer ytd-shelf-renderer:has(.ytd-thumbnail[href^="/shorts/"])
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-video-renderer .ytd-thumbnail[href^="/shorts/"]:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer)
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="channels"] #contents.ytd-reel-shelf-renderer:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer)
m.youtube.com##ytm-reel-shelf-renderer
m.youtube.com##ytm-pivot-bar-renderer div.pivot-shorts:upward(ytm-pivot-bar-item-renderer)
m.youtube.com##ytm-browse ytm-item-section-renderer ytm-video-with-context-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[data-style="SHORTS"])
m.youtube.com##ytm-browse ytm-item-section-renderer ytm-compact-video-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[data-style="SHORTS"])
m.youtube.com##ytm-search ytm-compact-video-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer[data-style="SHORTS"])
m.youtube.com##ytm-single-column-watch-next-results-renderer ytm-video-with-context-renderer:has(ytm-thumbnail-overlay-time-status-renderer span:has-text(/^(0:\d\d|1:0\d)$/))
```
![My Filters](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/10/01-my-filters.png)


Once you've added these simply refresh YouTube and you'll see that both the #shorts menu option has now gone, and if you 
view your channel subscriptions you'll no longer see #shorts! 

I wish we didn't have to do this, YouTube should offer a simply toggle option to turn #shorts on or off but it is what
it is. At least we can turn it off ourselves!


SAY NO TO YOUTUBE SHORTS!

![Dreamy Milkshake](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/09/00-cover.jpg)

You might have heard some buzz around Chia seeds recently. I've been trying to consume them in various forms for the last 
6 months or so. I know people have shared one method on Tik-Tok called "The Internal Shower" which involved drinking Chia
Seeds mixed with Fresh Lemon water. I wasn't a particularly big fan of this. Chia seeds go like Frogspawn in Water and
are pretty gross to drink like this. But fear not I have an awesome way to consume Chia seeds! 

I've been making a Chia seed + Cacao Powder Milkshake each morning for breakfast and it's so good it feels like I have
a cheat code for life. Not only can I now look forward to Chocolate Milkshake every day of my life, but it's insanely
good for me as well! 

Look at this list of health benefits!

## Chia Seeds

* Highly nutritious. Just 2x tablespoons contains the following:
  * Calories: 138
  * Protein: 4.7 grams
  * Fat: 8.7 grams
  * Alpha-Linolenic Acid (Omega-3): 5 grams
  * Carbs: 11.9 grams
  * Fiber: 9.8 grams
  * Calcium: 14% of the Daily Value (DV)
  * Iron: 12% of the DV
  * Magnesium: 23% of the DV
  * Phosphorus: 20% of the DV
  * Zinc: 12% of the DV
  * Vitamin B1 (thiamine): 15% of the DV
  * Vitamin B3 (niacin): 16% of the DV
* Packed with Antioxidants
* Help with weight loss 
* Lower risk of Heart Disease
* Improved Bone Health
* Reduced Blood Sugar levels

Isn't all this great? I think we really should be trying to incorporate these into everybody's daily diet. We'd 
be a healthier nation if we did! 

## Cacao Powder

* Highly nutritious. Just 2x tablespoons contains the following:
  * Calories: 130
  * Protein: 7 grams
  * Fat: 6 grams
  * Carbohydrates: 13 grams
  * Fiber: 8 grams
  * Sugar: 0 grams
* Lower blood pressure
* Reduced Diabetes risk
* Reduced Inflammation
* Lower levels of Stress
* Improved Cognitive function

Cacao powder is amazing stuff, honestly. 

Did you know? 

* Contains 40x the antioxidants that Blueberries do.
* The highest plant-based source of Iron known to man!
* Packed full of Magnesium, so great for your Heart, Brain and Immune system!
* More Calcium than cows milk!
* Contains Serotonin, Tryptophan, Tyrosine and Phenylethylamine so combats depression by improving your mood and makes you feel good...naturally!

Isn't this mind-blowing? I drink a Chocolate Milkshake every morning for Breakfast, and it turns out it's one of the 
best ways I've ever started my day!

I have to be honest though. I have misled you with the image at the top of this post...My actual milkshakes look more
like this.

![My Milkshake](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/09/01-milkshake.jpeg)

Still pretty good though huh... 

---
Update: I've been asked to add my recipe so here is what I do:

* 3/4 of a Pint of Milk.
* 2x Tablespoons of Chia Seeds
* 2x Tablespoons of Cacao Powder
* 1x Teaspoon of Sugar

I pour the milk into a glass and add the Chia seeds. I then put this in the fridge and leave for 20-30 minutes so the 
Chia seeds can absorb some of the milk and expand. 

After 20-30 minutes I transfer the Milk and Chia Seeds to my blender and add Cacao Powder and Sugar.

> I am adding Sugar because Cacao Powder is very bitter. I am planning to replace Sugar with a natural Sweetener such as Stevia.

Blend and pour!


So Good I Must Be Cheating!

![Happy New Year 2023](/assets/images/blog/2023/01/01/00-cover.jpg)

Happy New Year everybody! 

I am excited about 2023! If you read my previous post you'll know I didn't have a great 2022 so I decided to make some
big changes to my life this year. The biggest change is obviously cutting out Alcohol. I have set myself a Big Hairy 
Audacious Goal (BHAG) to go a full year without drinking Alcohol! I've never gone more than a month without in my entire 
adult life so this is going to be challenging!  

There are a number of reasons why I want to eliminate Alcohol from my life, health of course but mainly I just want a 
better quality of life day to day. I want to be productive in 2023 so that it doesn't feel like a complete waste like 
2022 did.

Jordan Peterson has his 12 rules for life. Well I have a few of my own now!

* Meditate EVERY day.
* Read EVERY day.
* Exercise EVERY day.
* Do NOT procrastinate!
* Be POSITIVE by default.
* Replace Alcohol with FUN.
* Get QUALITY sleep.

Now I know what you're thinking. This sounds like every single other person on earth in early January! I agree but these 
are all things I've been doing in bits and bats over the last year anyway. I just haven't had any consistency. I have
failed hard at self-discipline. 

As Joe Rogan likes to say; this year I will conquer my inner bitch!

I know we're only 4 days into January right now but I have to say I feel great and I'm smashing my new rules on the daily. 

This is how I intend to incorporate my rules into my daily routine.

# Meditation

The first thing I do every morning now is sit and meditate. I like to clear my mind and focus on my breathing. I have 
various different breath-work techniques that I like to use that really get the oxygen into my system and give me a nice
sense of calm for the day ahead. 

# Reading / Light Exercise 

Once I finish my morning meditation session I like to head downstairs to my treadmill and read a book for an hour whilst 
walking at a nice brisk pace. I continue to focus on my breathing whilst I do so. I am thinking I will continue to read 
self-help / computing / business books in the morning to help focus my mind for the office. 

When I finish my hour on the treadmill it's time for my breakfast shake and shower. I like to make a Chia Seed and Cacao
Powder milkshake for breakfast. I might make a post about this actually it's quite cool and shockingly good for you!

Edit: I made a [post](https://www.liam-reilly.info/blog/post/chia-seed-breakfast-milkshake/) about my Chia Seed 
Breakfast Chocolate Milkshake!

# Procrastination 

Once I've had breakfast I take a shower and head into the office. I will now tackle all the worst jobs first and get them 
out of the way! Things like replying to emails and general business admin. With this out of the way I am then free to 
focus on the interesting things that I want to be working on without that doom in the back of my head that used to be there
because I'd put things off.

# Positivity 

It's fair to say I do have a very cynical outlook and this can be dangerous and harmful to my overall positivity.  

To combat this I am just point-blank refusing to engage with social media and mainstream media in general. I will be 
conscious of my thoughts and words during conversations and I will continually evaluate and make sure I am in a positive 
mindset by default rather than slipping towards negativity.

During the day whilst I work I like to listen to comedy podcasts and interesting self-help/business podcasts. In the 
evenings I like to watch stand-up comedy and movies. 

I never consume mainstream media or "news"! 

# Replacing Alcohol with FUN

Over the last few years since the lockdowns I've felt like my life kinda stopped. Everyday felt the same like I was 
living Groundhog day. I drank far too much and stopped doing all the things I used to enjoy.

So this year I am making sure to get back to enjoying life. Jan 2nd I went to the IMAX to watch Avatar 2. (Which is 
awesome btw). I'm hoping to get more UFC tickets for March. I have Tom Segura tickets booked already for May. I am going
to do as much as I can this year.

But it doesn't have to be all going out-out things. I've recently really got back into gaming. I'm currently something 
like 76 hours deep into Cyberpunk 2077 and 50 hours deep into Vampire Survivors! I bought both of these games just before
Christmas! 

I'm definitely going to fill my evenings/weekends with more gaming and work-outs in my home gym this year instead of sitting
drinking beer for the sake of it whilst watching TV.

# Quality Sleep

Laptops and Phones are now banned from my bedroom in the evenings. From now on I am going to read a book in bed. A 
physical book, and most often this will be a fictional novel. YES I will read the rest of The Lord of the Rings books 
this year! 

I will read a book in bed until I am ready to sleep. 

--- 

# How about you? 

What changes have you made to your life to ensure 2023 and beyond is great? 

Happy New Year!

![Goodbye 2022 Hello 2023](/assets/images/blog/2022/12/23/00-cover.png)

2022 is not a year I will remember particularly fondly. Well the same can be said for 2020 and 2021 to be honest but 
2022 was especially bad. It wasn't all completely terrible I had a few exceptionally good times. My lad turning 16 was 
great. Our weekend down in London for the UFC was the highlight of the year and maybe my life 😎! I also turned 40 and had a great couple of 
weeks in October. Celebrations that lasted 3 weeks that included nights out in Manchester with friends, a night out with 
the family and close friends which started with a fantastic Indian meal and then ended with an awesome house party, and
finally a nice night out with just the parents watching stand up comedy. 

But that's 4 good times in the space a full year. Everything else felt like 1 long boring repeating day. 2022 was the year 
in which I broke up with my long term girlfriend who I thought I was going to grow old with. I thought by the end of 
2022 I would have left the country and would be starting to live the life we'd been talking about and working towards 
for the last couple of years. But alas it wasn't meant to be.

For the last 6 months since that happened I've kinda drifted, day by day with close to zero motivation to do anything. I
decided to take a month off, which turned into 2, then 3 and has now been close to 5. That's 5 completely pointless and fruitless
months where I've moved forwards not 1 step closer to my goals. I'm pretty salty about that. Upset with myself for taking
the easy way out and sulking :/

Another thing I've struggled with this year is I've not been able to exercise. Exercise got me through 2020/2021 but 
unfortunately I ended up with a Hernia from over doing it. I thought it was going to be fixed early in the year but sadly
the operation was cancelled because I wouldn't play ball with the stupid Covid requirements. My mood and motivation 
definitely suffered when I was unable to exercise and I found myself drinking more and more instead, and this was before
I broke up with my girlfriend!

One positive I can find from this year though is I started to meditate and I saw immediate benefits. I started to cut back 
on my drinking, almost entirely eliminating drinking at home. I felt better and new ideas came to me and I started to 
find some motivation for the first time in months and from here I decided that I'm going to make big changes in 2023.

In 2023 I am going to have my first year in my adult life without Alcohol. I thought about doing "Dry January", then it was 
suggested that I aim for 90 days instead to re-wire my brain and relationship with Alcohol. But honestly why stop there?

After doing nothing for half of the year I never want to be this unproductive again. I want to see what life looks like
when I throw myself 100% into my work. When there are no distractions, no hangovers, just 100% focus on hard work and 
dedication to my personal health and well-being. 

So there it is. That's my plans for 2023. More dedication to my work and my future. More meditation. More reading 
(which also slowed down significantly this year). No boozing. At all. For a full year. 

It's not going to be easy. With the exceptions of the odd dry month here and there over the years I've always drank beer.
I've formed so many associations in my brain that include beer. Watching UFC? Beer. Friday afternoon. Beer. 
Day ends in a Y. Beer.

But I'm going to take it day by day. I have the app on my phone ready to go. I'm actually really excited about it! 
I'm excited to see what I can get done and who I can be without Alcohol.

One things for sure. 2023 is not going to be a repeat of the last few years and when I write my end of year blog post next
year I will not be filled with the same regrets that I have this year.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone from me :) 


To infinity and beyond!

![BIG](/assets/images/blog/2022/12/18/00-cover.png)

# Notorious

So I stayed up late on Friday night to watch the Notorious B.I.G. VR Concert in Meta Horizon Worlds. 
If you read my last blog post exactly a month ago, you'll know I've been patiently waiting for the event and was super 
hyped for what it might be. I have to say I've got mixed feelings now that I've seen it. Some good, some bad. 
Overall it was just a little disappointing.

## What was good:

### Avatars

The 3D avatars of both Biggie and P.Diddy were very good! When I first walked in I thought they were playing old Biggie 
music videos before the concert started. I later realised I was watching a computer generated music video and the 
Biggie I was looking at was actually the 3D avatar biggie. Impressive.

I do have a small complaint with the avatars though. I don't think they tried at all to lip sync the avatars with the 
words they were saying. This was very noticeable during the stage performance but not the end of the world. The models
also moved around a little weird at times. It was just weird. 

### The Concert

The concert portion of the event was pretty dope. Ignoring my complaints which will come later, it was cool to see 
Biggie and P. Diddy avatars both performing on stage at the same time with Lil Cease and The Lox who also both nailed it.

I also liked much like in real life there were big TV screens above the stage that would show close ups of the action 
on stage. I think it really helps with the immersion when you have Biggie stood on the stage performing in front of you 
and you can look up and see him on the TV screen. It just makes it seem more real to the brain I think.

### New Music

We got treated to Biggie and Lil Cease performing "new" music (previously unreleased), which was nice! 

### P. Diddy

I am not sure why P. Diddy was an avatar considering he's still alive and could have done the event in person, but I'm 
kinda glad they went this route because the Diddy avatar was hilarious. I legit thought he was gonna fall over more than
once. He was super animated it was wild. 😂

## What was not so good:

### Atmosphere / Environment

I don't know who's choice this was but from the moment I joined the event I was disappointed. I was expecting to walk 
into some sort of VR arena and stand in a large crowd in front of a stage as in real life. Instead Meta have opted to 
simply allow a small number of people into separate instances which is just a small area (area not arena!) with a large 
180 degree screen at the front.

I thought I was going to a VR concert. I was expecting to be stood in front of a stage watching Biggie walking around 
large as life in full 3D in front of me. What we actually got was a 180 degree video wall playing a video of real 
performers on a stage alongside Biggie/Diddy avatars.

I'm sorry but it's just not a VR concert to me if we're not in the same space.

Unfortunately because of this the event just has absolutely no atmosphere. It just felt like I was watching a video alone
rather than at a gig with thousands of other people enjoying the performances.

### Other People

One gripe I have with Meta Horizon Worlds that is easily solved and has been in VR Chat is every world and instance is 
public. This means that you have no control over the other people in the instance you land in. My instance was filled 
with annoying kids shouting and trying to talk to everyone in the room and generally ruining the experience for 
everybody else.

This problem does not exist in VR Chat as in VR Chat you can create a private instance of any of the worlds and then 
simply travel there with your friends/party that you invite.

You might be thinking so wouldn't it have been much worse in an arena stood with thousands of other people? Yes it would 
probably suck, but only if the other people were real. I think it would perfectly acceptable to have an arena in a 
private instance filled with computer generated avatars (fake people). You don't need to talk to them, you can talk to 
the people you invited. But having a crowd there would simulate reality much better.

Please Meta take that idea and implement it, you can have that one for free!

### Censorship

I almost left this concert as soon as it started. Because this is Meta everybody is treated like a child and as such 
lots of "problematic" words were muted during live performances. I'm a 40 year old man attending a hip-hop concert. I 
do not expect language to be moderated. To make matters worse there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to which words 
were muted and when you consider the context of what they lyrics are saying anyway, what's the point of censoring any 
words? It's stupid and dumb and it needs to stop.

If this is the future of live music events. I do not want it. I especially do not want Meta to have any control of it 
at all considering their authoritarian position of dumbing down, censoring and "protecting" adults feelings. The entire 
Horizon Worlds app feels like it's designed for 10 year olds that must be "safe" at all costs.

### Music Video Sections

Before and after the live concert section of the event their was these computer generated music videos of sorts. Based 
in a 3D city environment which felt like a level from an old Grand Theft Auto game you'd have P. Diddy driving Biggie 
around in a car (backwards for some reason) whilst Biggie spat bars. The idea is fine but what killed it for me was how 
basic it looked. I felt like I was trapped inside an old Playstation 1 era computer game, like a GTA cutscene or 
something. It looked awful. It does have potential though. At the end there is a section where P. Diddy is driving slowly
forwards with Biggie sat in the back of the car waving to his fans as they line the street. The camera does a flyover 
across the road and into an apartment where the scene is playing until you're back inside the scene. 
It's cool and something only possible in VR. If they could just make it look better I think there is a bright future 
there.

### Accessibility

Horizon Worlds did a terrible job advertising this and it's impossible to easily access your favourite parts. In fact 
it's worse than just this, I still haven't been able to watch the documentary portion of the event. I checked the times 
on Friday and Meta said the event runs 2AM to 4AM. I turned up at 2AM to watch the event and it was already showing the 
computer generated music videos. Apparently the documentary was shown sometime before I arrived. I've since been back 
into 3 different instances of the event and I've seen the same parts every time. Where is the documentary and why can't 
I just jump to it from the menu?

## Conclusion

Overall it's a cool idea and I want to see more of it in the future, but it's got to be done better than this. The 
concert portion of the event was enjoyable but could have been much better. Fixing small things like the arena and 
adding a few basic features to allow people to customise their experience would go a long way.

Also next time the avatar performer absolutely MUST be in the same instance as the viewer and not just a 180 degree 
video. This is VR afterall!

NOTORIOUSLY BAD?

Meta gets a bad rap over this whole Metaverse stuff but that doesn't mean they aren't doing some good things. I'm 
certainly not a fan of Mark Zuckerberg and I really have always despised Facebook. I think the company is toxic and has 
caused all manner of problems across the globe, ranging from psychological damage of its own users through to influencing
democratic elections and aiding the West overseas with illegal coup d'etat and regime changes.

I'm also not a fan of the decision to rebrand Facebook as Meta. I understand why this decision was made, and it's 
actually quite clever. Not only can Facebook distance itself from all the negative issues it's faced so far
but by choosing the name Meta they are actually ensuring that whenever people discuss the future of VR/AR, they will 
think of Meta first.  I've read the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. This book was where the term Metaverse was 
originally coined and I believe it's mandatory reading for all employees of Meta that work in the VR/AR division. In 
this book everybody wears a VR headset and live out their lives inside a virtual reality called "The Metaverse". 
If you've seen the movie [Ready Player One](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1677720/) then you can already imagine the 
future that Mark Zuckerberg is trying to create and OWN! If this gambles works out believe me Meta will be the most 
valuable company on earth in the next 10 years. They will control the world we (virtually) live in, they will control
the language, the education system, the economy, the businesses that are allowed to exist. Everything!

Putting all that aside and as much as I wish it was another company such as [Valve](https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/) 
that were pushing VR/AR forward it's not, it's Meta, but I have to say they are doing some good things that we can 
enjoy before the ultimate dystopian future is ready :P 

There is no other company on earth right now that is pouring more resources into research and development of new VR/AR
equipment and software. They have the most popular VR headset in the world in the 
[Quest 2](https://www.meta.com/gb/en/quest/products/quest-2), and they have just released a more advanced headset which
pushes the entire industry forward with many innovations in the [Quest Pro](https://www.meta.com/gb/quest/quest-pro/) 
(aimed at professional developers at this time). On the software side Meta are ahead of the game again with their own
Meta VR Store filled with exclusive games/experiences and software. One of the more interesting of these exclusive 
software offerings is [Horizon Worlds](https://www.oculus.com/horizon-worlds/?locale=en_GB). If you've ever used 
[VR Chat](https://hello.vrchat.com/) before then Horizon Worlds is like Meta's version of this. It's got a long way to 
go to catch VR Chat, famously your avatars don't even have [legs](https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/14/metas-legs-update-is-not-on-the-horizon-yet/?guccounter=1) 
yet, but it's essentially a very early version of what could become the Metaverse. 

It's a VR world where people can hang out with friends and make new friends. It's filled with games to play
and also hosts special events like sporting events or concerts where you can attend virtually with your friends. In a
couple of weeks on December 16th Meta are hosting a special concert where Biggie Smalls (The Notorious B.I.G.) will be
"brought back" as a hyper-realistic 3D Avatar to perform his classics on stage in Horizon Worlds!

![BIG](/assets/images/blog/2022/11/18/00-cover.png)

If you are as old as me you might remember [Tupac](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/how-the-tupac-hologram-works/2012/04/18/gIQA1ZVyQT_story.html)
was "resurrected" in a similar fashion back at Coachella in 2012 and whilst that was mind-blowing and freaky at the time
it was limited to just the few lucky people at the event. This time around it's open to all you just need to pick up a
VR headset.

The gig will also feature other artists such as P. Diddy and will include a narrative journey through Biggies life.

I don't know about you, but I cannot wait to see this! 

NOTORIOUS

This was not the post I was expecting to write upon my return from my 3 month hiatus, but I can't ignore this!

I was shopping in Tesco yesterday for some bread flour. I wanted to make a homemade soup today so of course you can't have
soup without bread. As I was scanning over the various types of flour I spotted this Organic flour by Tesco themselves. 

![Organic Flour](/assets/images/blog/2022/11/01/00-tesco-organic-front.jpeg)

Curiously I picked it up to have a look at the ingredients to compare to a non-organic flour. This is what I saw:

![Ingredients List](/assets/images/blog/2022/11/01/01-tesco-organic-side.jpeg)

Do you notice anything strange here? I did! Of the 5 ingredients I noticed that 4 of them had a little * next to them. 
Upon further inspection I see the meaning of this star is as follows:

> \* Denotes non-organic ingredient

Can somebody please explain to me how organic flour can contain 80% non-organic ingredients? 

How on earth is this allowed? Looking at the front of the packaging, the largest font and most prominent word is 
"ORGANIC". How is this not false advertising?

I find it utterly insane that 4 of the 5 ingredients listed in a so called "organic" flour. Can be non-organic.

The worlds gone mad!

---

In other news my soup and bread was a great success :)

![Soup and Bread](/assets/images/blog/2022/11/01/02-soup-and-bread.jpeg)



ORGANIC? MY ARSE

![POSTER](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/00-cover.jpg)

Last weekend was the greatest weekend of my life. I spent last weekend with my amazing son Callum and I took him to 
London to watch UFC live at the O2 arena. 

Me and Callum love UFC, we've been watching it together for years! For his upcoming 16th birthday I couldn't think of 
anything better than to get tickets for the UFC and it must have been meant to be because UFC had just been to the O2 
arena in London just a couple of months ago. Never (that I can remember) has Dana White enjoyed a venue so much that 
he changes his plans for the UFC and comes back to the same place twice in a couple of months but that's what happened 
here and it wasn't the end of our good fortune.

Everything and I mean everything was perfect this weekend. The stars definitely aligned and nothing could 
have made this weekend any better. From start to finish everything just ran exactly as we'd hoped. Although we weren't sure on the 
Friday morning when we were getting ready to leave. After the "climate emergency" that lasted a whole 2 days earlier in 
the week it was now raining and looking at the schedules it was very much business as usual in the weather department. 

So we got a taxi to the train station had quick coffee and pint and boarded our train. We sat down at our table seat and
soon realised we had an almost completely empty carriage to enjoy a calm ride down to London. As luck would have it 
minutes after we sat down on the train another event we like One Championship was just starting. So we watched some live
Muay Thai, Kickboxing and MMA from Manchester to London. What a start to the weekend.   

By the time we stepped off the train in London the sun was shining and it was sweltering 
hot. The first thing I wanted to do was get changed into my shorts! So we strolled down to the hotel, checked in, got 
changed and ventured out to explore.

We headed back to the O2 arena to get some pictures in-front of the famous big Red UFC letters. 

![UFC](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/01-ufc.jpg)

With that out of the way next thing we needed was some UFC hats. 

![Hats](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/02-hats.jpg)

Next stop FOOD. We had a quick look around the arena to see what was on offer and spotted Gordon Ramsey Street Burger so in we went.
This place is great we loved it. The service was awesome and considering it was just burger and chips it was next level
burger and chips. The first thing Callum said to me was "this place is worth it for the chips alone", and it really was.

![Food](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/03-food.jpg)

Whilst we were eating and wondering what we should do next we remembered seeing the 
[Emirates Air Line Cable Cars](https://visitlondon.com/things-to-do/place/25549367-emirates-air-line-cable-car) and we
decided we should head back and give it a ride to get some pics whilst it was still light outside. Everything looks a 
lot smaller from up here. 

![AirLine](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/04-airline.jpg)

Once we had finished on the cable cars we headed back to the O2 once again to a great little place called 
[Boom Battle Bar](https://www.theo2.co.uk/do-more-at-the-o2/boom-battle-bar). This place is great it has axe throwing, 
American Pool, Digital Darts, Crazier Golf, all sorts of stuff. We went in because I spotted the Pool tables and Callum 
said to me that he'd only ever played Pool with me in VR! 

![Pool](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/05-pool.jpg)

He actually won the first 2 games. I potted the Black almost immediately on the first game and I think I potted the White
and the Black at the same time on the 2nd game. I won the next 3 though to save some face. 

Once we left the bar we headed back to the hotel. I'd brought my laptop with me and loaded it up with movies so we 
watched Man on Fire and had some hotel beers. There may have been some tears at this point.

The next morning we loaded up on a big hotel breakfast and then headed straight back out towards the arena to see what 
we could do before the event started. We tried to do a few tourist-ey things including walking over a bridge on the roof
of the O2 arena and the other drink at the tables in the sky, but sadly and to our complete shock they were fully booked!
So instead we stayed at ground level and chilled in the sun in the garden bar next to the arena and had a couple beers.

Later we went for a walk and the two parties that were enjoying food and drinks at the 
[London in the Sky](https://londoninthesky.co.uk/) bar were arguing and shouting at each other across tables. We're 
pretty sure it was football rivalry but whatever it was, it was hilarious. 

![Sky](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/06-sky.jpg)

Later on we were hungry again so I said to Callum let's go Gaucho for a fancy Steak & Chips before the event starts.
Just look at it.

![Steak](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/07-steak.jpg)

We didn't rush ourselves in here. Nice glass of Red with the Steak and a beer to wash it all down. Then it was finally
time to go to the UFC!

Just look at our excited little faces. 

![Faces](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/08-faces.jpg)

We were finally here. After all these years there was the Octogon right in front of us.

![Arena](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/09-arena.jpg)

From the get-go the legendary Bruce Buffer had the crowd in the palm of his hands. It's really something special watching
him work a crowd. We always knew he was a fan favourite but the connection that he has with the crowd is extraordinary.
I have a video of him delivering his lines during the main event fight and I am not exaggerating when I say it felt 
like every single person in that arena was shouting his lines with him. It was epic. 

Being in the arena at an actual UFC event so much better than I had ever even thought it would be. I've been to other 
cage fighting promotions in the past but nothing compares to the juggernaut that is the UFC. This is just so much bigger.
The vibe in the arena is amazing, a complete party atmosphere. Considering the amount of alcohol being consumed and the 
fact that everybody in the arena clearly has a penchant for violence it is pretty amazing to realise we 
didn't see a single bit of trouble the entire weekend. Everybody was just drinking and singing and enjoying the event. 
You can honestly see more trouble in Piccadilly Gardens any given day.

I think my big take away from the event was I never realised quite how involved the crowd was with everything. You've 
probably heard the saying in football "be the 12 man" and I've been to plenty of football games being a season ticket 
holder at Manchester United for many years but inside the O2 arena last weekend it really felt like the crowd was 
connected to the fighters in a way I've never experienced before. 

As soon as the walkout music came on the crowd would just go wild. Usually for the UK fighter in each fight, Meatball 
Molly's walkout was legendary as was Paddy the Baddy's but honestly American fighter Chris Curtis might have had the best 
walkout moment of the night with Sweet Caroline! Again not a person in attendance that wasn't singing and dancing to this
including Bruce Buffer! 

It was so good it's honestly going to be difficult to accept that we can't be there every weekend and I'm going to have
to go back to watching it on TV or in VR again. If you ever get the chance to go to a UFC event I strongly encourage you
to go. I've never been to a better event in my life.

The only letdown the entire weekend was obviously the main event. Callum and I were super hyped for months to watch Tom
Aspinal fight in real life. He's has such a great journey so far with some very impressive wins over tough opponents, he
has future world champion written all over him and we're here for it! But this weekend wasn't his weekend at all. Not 15
seconds after the first round started he threw a perfect leg kick which landed but then as his foot went back down on the
matt he collapsed to the floor holding his knee. Fight over. Very deflating end to a fantastic event. I know everyone 
is wishing Tom a speedy recovery and can't wait to see him in the cage again. 

As we were leaving the arena we knew we wanted to try and snag a couple of the UFC London t-shirts that we'd been seeing
people wearing so we went to the first UFC Store stand we could find. They had a very limited number of t-shirts left 
but as luck was on our side they had a Large and a Small which is exactly what we wanted. Honestly the entire weekend 
was like this. Everything just ran smoothly. From taxi's to trains, everything like clockwork. 

![March](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/10-merch.jpg)

In fact talking about trains we had a notification before we left to say that our return train on the Sunday had been 
cancelled so we knew we'd be getting a different train home. So we had breakfast and went to the station. When we
were getting on the train we could see that it was extra busy because of the cancellations so I said "let's just get 
first class. I'll pay for the upgrade". So we sat in first class and nobody came the entire journey. So we got a nice 
little free upgrade and comfortable ride home to end the weekend. It was flawless it really was.

![Smiles](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/28/11-smiles.jpg)

If Carlsberg did weekends, they'd do them like this one! 

BEST WEEKEND EVER!

![Serverless Framework Logo](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/14/00-cover.jpg)

I've been building enterprise cloud infrastructure with Terraform for the last 6 years or so. Mostly AWS
(Amazon Web Services), some GCP (Google Cloud Platform) and sadly even some Microsoft Azure 😉 mostly always using
Terraform. I like Terraform for many reasons, some of which will be highlighted during this post. Most won't be however
but maybe I'll write some follow-up posts to sing its praises who knows? But today I want to talk about both
Serverless Framework and CloudFormation.

For the last 6 months I’ve been using Serverless Framework and CloudFormation daily. I’d never used either of these
technologies before because honestly I've never seen a need to because I'm so happy and used to Terraform.  But I do
love to learn and evaluate new tech explore new ways of doing things, so I jumped into the docs and looked around some
existing serverless projects to see what it was all about. Let me tell you right off the bat I did not like what I saw
with Serverless Framework or CloudFormation... and 6 months later I like them even less.

### Serverless Framework gripes:

* Everything is a plugin
* Unpredictable behaviour
* Encourages bad practices
* Ridiculous Duplication
* YAML

### CloudFormation gripes:

* Change sets
* Very limited functionality
* YAML

Let me go through each of these and give you a little detail as to why I think they are a problem.

## Serverless Framework

#### Plugins

So first coming from a Terraform background I have long held a belief that one of the big reasons and major benefits of IaC
(Infrastructure as Code) is that your cloud infrastructure is clearly expressed as code, making it re-usable,
easy to reason about and easy to track changes over time. **Serverless Framework seems to do away with all of that!**

Before I go on I should preface my opinions that follow:

> As I've said I'm new to Serverless Framework so I don't know how it's evolved over time but if I had to guess I'd say
that it started as a relatively simple project that just let developers quickly get their code up and running in
AWS Lambda, and over time it's grown and grown through rampant scope creep and wild plugin system which now allows
engineers to do far more than they should...and that's less than ideal. - Liam Reilly

With that out of the way let's talk about Serverless Framework and it's many "useful" plugins.

When I first sat down to look at Serverless Framework I thought it looks harmless enough, define a few functions and a
couple of additional resources like SQS queues, SNS topics, S3 buckets etc. add some permissions via iam roles and deploy.
Nice, so far so good. For a hobby project this is awesome and I can see the attraction. But for enterprise you very 
quickly realise the limitations and find that you need to override or tweak something in your deployment. 
Now if you're lucky they will have thought of it and made available some kind of parameter you can override but most of
the time you're going to be looking for a plugin or completely ignoring Serverless Framework and just declaring the 
thing yourself in CloudFormation (I've done this extensively now).

Let's say you find yourself in this situation. You want to override or extend Serverless Framework somehow to tweak some
part of your deployment. Let's say you search the [Serverless Framework Plugins directory](https://www.serverless.com/plugins/)
and find one that fits your exact needs. You add it to your project and add whatever configuration it needs 
(the plugin page will include some example code serving as documentation of completely varying levels of quality) to 
override the thing you wanted to change and redeploy. Now you look over your deployed infrastructure and awesome 
it's all as you wanted it to be. Sure seems great, but I'd argue it's not!

* What exactly has this plugin done?
* What mysterious configuration has it generated and applied to your cloud infrastructure?
* What happens if the plugin maintainers change something you don't like in a future version?
* What happens if the plugin is simply discontinued altogether?

These are all good questions but it's the first one that I worry about the most. Yes I can see I've enabled a plugin and
yes I can see I've added some minimal configuration. First the most part I can easily deduce what my intended
outcome is, BUT I have to cross my fingers and hope that this is what actually happens or gets applied. Ultimately I have
no real way of knowing what is going on in my infrastructure because I didn't define it,  I cannot see it and I cannot 
control it!

**I do not like this.**

I also find the plugins to be very limited. Take for example the [serverless-deployment-bucket](https://www.serverless.com/plugins/serverless-deployment-bucket)
plugin. This plugin simply gives you some control on the S3 bucket that Serverless Framework uses to store deployment
artifacts. The plugin gives you more control over the name of the bucket and allows you to set encryption and things 
like that. However, it still doesn't do the one thing that I instantly hated about Serverless Framework; allow me to 
re-use a single S3 bucket and organise multiple projects/stacks into sub folders. Instead, I have to "waste" one S3 
bucket for every stack I deploy. From the get-go, on an enterprise project this sucks! Will this ever be addressed? 
Will the plugin ever be extended to improve this situation? We are held captive and not in control of our own destiny.

**I do not like this.**

This is not an issue if you use Terraform. With Terraform you have full control over where your IaC build artifacts and
state files live. You can use 1x S3 bucket say it's called `infrastructure`. You can then use sub folders inside here to
split your common infrastructure and app infrastructure up by the region you are deploying into imagine:

>infrastructure/eu-west-1/app1

>infrastructure/eu-west-1/app2

>infrastructure/eu-west-2/app3

In Terraform you have a single S3 bucket vs three already in this example. I don't want to pick on this plugin in particular 
too much because it's the same issue with or without the plugin. I just thought it was worth a mention because it's 
something that frustrated me from day one that I'd never given a second thought before.

#### Unpredictable behaviour

Again this might be related to the way I'm seeing Serverless Framework being used now, maybe because of the way it's
grown over time. I guess that this being the *Serverless* framework there was an expectation
that the infrastructure being built would be ephemeral/transient/temporary and tearing it down before it was re-deployed
would be standard practice. Instead, what we have now is permanent infrastructure being deployed in stacks where it's
never going to be desirable to tear them down again.

You'd think this would be fine it's just CloudFormation at the end of the day. It will simply look at my existing cloud
infrastructure and compare that to my latest `serverless.yml` configuration file and bring the two inline with each other.
Most of the time this is true but not always. Especially when you're working with Serverless Framework.

There are certain resources that Serverless Framework will create as specified **ONLY** on the initial deployment. An
example of this would be CloudWatch Log Groups. If you define `tags` for your Log Group on initial deployment they will be
added, but if you change these `tags` and redeploy they will not be added/amended. You won't be notified of this. They
just won't be updated.

**I do not like this.**

This is just one example, I've experienced other strange behaviour like this, API Gateway springs to mind. I've had a
number of headaches with this refusing to deploy new methods to a stage until I gave up, tore it down and redeployed
from scratch. Once again no indication that it hasn't deployed properly. You just realise it's broken and bits of it are
missing.

Who knows how many other weird things like this exist across all the other AWS services when using Serverless Framework?

#### Encourages bad practices

You may remember earlier on I mentioned how easy it was to get going on a new project using Serverless Framework.
One key reason it's so easy is because you simply define a list of permissions at the provider level
(think global stack level) and Serverless Framework will then make sure that everything you asked for is added to the
execution role for each Lambda Function in your stack. How helpful...

I've also noticed that it will also add in other permissions that you did not specify! A common example would be
CloudWatch Log Groups/Streams. These seem to appear in each Lambda execution role granting permissions to every Log
Group and Stream for every Lambda. Yuck. Call me old fashioned but I like to know that the permissions I clearly express
in my configuration are the permissions that are deployed to my cloud infrastructure.

**I do not like this.**

I fail to understand how this choice was ever seriously considered never mind actually implemented! What happened to the
principle of least privilege? You really don't want one size fits all when it comes to your Lambda functions execution
roles, but this is what using Serverless Framework encourages. As always there is a
[plugin](https://www.serverless.com/plugins/serverless-iam-roles-per-function) to work around this issue and define `iam`
roles at the function level, but you have to know it exists and then install/configure it when really it should be like
this out of the box.

#### Ridiculous Duplication

This one really irks me. There is soooo much duplication when working with Serverless Framework and CloudFormation in
general. Coming from a Terraform background it's almost hard to believe this is accepted.

In Terraform I'm used to defining `modules` (in this simple example just a folder with Terraform in) so that I can simply
re-use existing configuration many times over.

Say you need a couple of S3 buckets. In Terraform you would create a folder, let's call it `/modules/s3-bucket`.
In this folder you'd write a `main.tf` file and add some S3 resource configuration (as simple or comprehensive as you
like, remember you're only ever going to write this once). You might also choose to add a `variables.tf` file which
allows the user of the module to override certain values and opt in or out of certain features entirely.

To use the module you would do something like the code below which would create 2x S3 buckets one with encryption
enabled and one without. (Remember all the real comprehensive configuration to enable encryption on the bucket is defined
once inside the modules `main.tf`).

```javascript
module "secure-bucket" {
  source = "./modules/s3-bucket" 

  name                = "bucket-one"
  enable_encryption   = true
}

module "not-so-secure-bucket" {
  source = "./modules/s3-bucket" 

  name                = "bucket-two"
  enable_encryption   = false
}
```

Obviously this is a simplified example to prove a point but yes this is the extent of the duplication in Terraform.
I'm re-using a module that I already defined where all the decisions that were made were codified and signed off and
now adding another bucket is quick and easy and SAFE.

This is not possible in Serverless Framework or CloudFormation. Instead, for every new bucket I add I need to copy
and paste the same configuration and tweak as necessary. This wastes time, it produces unfathomable amounts of duplicated
code that is hard to reason about and difficult to maintain and if we want to change something we might have to make the
same change *everywhere* manually. What is this the 90's? What are we doing here? 

**I do not like this.**

#### YAML

This follows on nicely from what I was just saying about the duplication that Serverless Framework and CloudFormation in
general forces you to write. Instead of having nice modularised infrastructure code that's easy to organise and
understand you instead have thousands of lines of configuration in one sprawling `serverless.yml` file. Most of the
lines we've already discovered are duplication, so you already know something isn't right. Oh and the tooling for the
most part sucks. I cannot count the number of times I've tried to deploy only for Serverless Framework to tell me I've
cocked up the indentation of my configuration somewhere.

**I do not like this.**

In Terraform you do not have these problems. As I mentioned above Terraform allows you to build re-usable modules.
These can just be sub folders containing Terraform code but you can take this further. You can build these modules in a
completely separate repo if you like, or 1x repo per module (which is how I prefer to do it). You can then version these
modules independently following your standard `git` process simply make sure to `tag` the repo when you release a new
version. Then when using the module you can simply specify the `git::` repo address and `tag` number. So the example
from the previous section might look more like this:

```javascript
module "secure-bucket" {
  source = "git::git@gitlab.com:liam-reilly/tf-mod-aws-s3.git?ref=v0.0.2"

  name                = "bucket-one"
  enable_encryption   = true
}

module "not-so-secure-bucket" {
  source = "git::git@gitlab.com:liam-reilly/tf-mod-aws-s3.git?ref=v0.0.1"


  name                = "bucket-two"
  enable_encryption   = false
}
```

The secure bucket is using `v0.0.2` of the module which for the sake of this example let's imagine has added some extra
configuration to the encryption settings on the bucket to take advantage of some new feature or improvement from AWS. The
other bucket is still using the original version `v0.0.1` because it doesn't need this feature because it doesn't use
encryption.

Imagine this over many project across your entire organisation. Would you rather bump up a module ref for 50x buckets or
are you happy doing it the Serverless Framework/CloudFormation way and copy/pasting the entire new configuration
everywhere for each of the 50x buckets?

Oh and if you happen to use JetBrains IDE's like I do there is an absolutely amazing plugin for Terraform that makes 
writing it an absolute dream come true.

## CloudFormation

#### Change sets

This one was a real **WTF!?** moment for me. Again coming from a Terraform background I've become accustomed to the Terraform
`plan` and `apply` commands. In every pipeline I've ever built there has been a manual **review** step which runs a
Terraform `plan` and then lets me read over the output to see which resources are going to be **added**, **removed** or
**modified**. Knowing what is going to be **added** or **removed** is great but the level of detail for the resources which
are going to be **modified** is next level and has helped avoid so deployments over the years that would have resulted in
less than desirable changes! 

Another good thing about `terraform plan` is that it actually produces an artifact which can be uploaded for later use 
in the pipeline. Let's say you're happy with your review of the proposed changes, you click to trigger the next stage in
the pipeline, for argument’s sake this is `deploy` and it will run `terraform apply` using the artifact (plan) had been 
produced in the previous step.

This gives you complete confidence when deploying infrastructure. I do not have anywhere near this level of confidence
when deploying infrastructure using Serverless Framework/CloudFormation.

By default, in Serverless Framework V2 Change sets are not used at all. They can be used but you must opt in to this
manually. In V3 they seem to have addressed this and Change sets are generated but they are also might as well not be.
For a kick-off they are just automatically applied anyway, no manual review step here! But even if you were to review
the Change set, it's next to useless. It will tell you what's going to be `added`, `removed` and even `modified` but it
doesn't really give any detail on what the modifications are.

**I do not like this.**

Note: Serverless Framework will produce an artifact of sorts as well. It produces a CloudFormation JSON template 
showing the stacks desired state. It's not easy to follow or really designed for humans to read so whilst it's nice that 
it generates something you can look at, it's not as good as the output from Terraform which makes clear exactly what changes
are going to occur. It's also buried away rather than being front and center. I've never really looked at one of 
these files in any detail.

#### Very limited functionality

I do find CloudFormation to be very limited compared to Terraform. Terraform thanks to its proprietary HCL
(Hashicorp Configuration Language) is a purpose built programming language for cloud infrastructure. It has a lot of the 
things you'd expect to find in a programming language from `variables`, `functions` and `expressions` and some extra's 
all of its own like `outputs` and `data sources` (life as a cloud platform engineer without Terraforms data sources 
almost isn't worth living). It's very powerful and very easy to express comprehensive cloud infrastructure 
targeting any cloud provider you choose.

By comparison CloudFormation only works for AWS (obviously) and is massively restricted because of it's grounding in
`YAML`. It has barely any functionality compared to Terraform, making life much harder. 

**I do not like this.**

CloudFormation has just a handful of functions to help you out, I'm not sure how many Terraform has by comparison 
must be 100? Plus tons of other features.

#### YAML

I know I've already covered this once in the Serverless Framework section but I just wanted to say again. How did we
decide as an industry that we'd like to write giant reams of `YAML` for something as big as cloud infrastructure?
As soon as I started to look at CloudFormation it just brought back all those deeply suppressed memories of writing
Microsoft Azure ARM Templates many years ago. **Never again**

![Balance](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/14/01-balance.jpeg)

**Terraform was meant to bring balance to the force. Terraform IS the chosen one.**

Seriously everytime someone starts a new project and chooses Serverless Framework or CloudFormation instead of Terraform
a Jedi dies. Next time we are tasked with starting a new infrastructure project and the powers that be
are asking for Serverless Framework or CloudFormation, let's agree as an industry to remind them of Emperor Palpatine
executing Order 66 because this is essentially the same level of evil.

To finish let me just say I really have nothing against Serverless Framework or CloudFormation. I think like 
everything they have their use cases and can be good when used correctly. I wouldn't choose to use either myself even 
for my "hobby" projects but that's because I'm a professional and have extensive experience building enterprise cloud 
infrastructure with Terraform...Plus I've already built all my Terraform modules!  

The point of the post was just to allow me to get the things I've learned and observed over the last 6 months on 
paper as it were so that it's not forgotten. Hopefully someone else will find it useful. If you do find it useful let me
know! 

Serverless Framework - RANT

![SponsorBlock Logo](https://sponsor.ajay.app/LogoSponsorBlock256px.png)

This is going to be a short post, I really just want to share a cool browser extension that I discovered
this week [SponsorBlock](https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock) by [Ajay Ramachandran](https://ajay.app/).

I watch a lot of podcasts on YouTube in my spare time, mostly US comedy podcasts with all my favourite American 
stand-up comedians. Over the last few years I've noticed a big increase in the number of sponsored ad reads that 
are being spliced into podcast episodes and I absolutely HATE them! I'm not a fan of advertising at the best of times. 
I find it's usually both patronising and infantilising but something about these ad reads really winds me up more than 
ever. I think it's because there is absolutely no effort from the podcast host who is reading the ads. They tell me 
how much they "love" the product and how they use it all the time, but it's obvious they don't use it and couldn't 
really care less about it. I just cannot stand fake-ness like that it really grinds my gears and just guarantees I'll 
never purchase the product! Overtime I've gotten very good at skipping past the ad reads as soon as they start but this 
in itself is still annoying especially when the ad cuts off an interesting conversation. 

But fear not there is a solution. SponsorBlock!

> SponsorBlock is an open-source crowdsourced browser extension and open API for skipping sponsor segments in YouTube 
> videos. Users submit when a sponsor happens from the extension, and the extension automatically skips sponsors it 
> knows about using a privacy preserving query system. It also supports skipping other categories, such as intros, 
> outros and reminders to subscribe, and skipping to the point with highlight.

I've installed this extension today in Firefox and tried it out on a couple of my favourite ad-read-filled comedy 
podcasts and it's great! As soon as your YouTube video loads you can see the exact locations of the sponsored ad reads
on the progress bar. It changes the colour of these segments to Green instead of the usual Red. As your video plays and
you reach the start of one of these Green ad segments it simply skips right past it automatically. Awesome!

As I mentioned I installed and tested SponsorBlock on Firefox but it supports all the usual desktop browsers and even 
works on mobile devices, Android and iOS!

If you're sick of all the incessant ad reads check it out honestly it's great!

SponsorBlock

![shower](/assets/images/blog/2022/07/02/00-cover.jpg)

I've been taking cold showers for over a month now. As I explained in my previous post on the subject it was difficult at
first, and I was slowly training my body by starting off with slightly warmer water and then turning it down to the 
coldest settings once my body had adjusted. For the last couple of weeks in June I stopped this and just got in the 
shower every morning with it already on the coldest setting. I soon got used to this, so it was time to up the 
challenge once again.

For the last 4 or 5 days I've been getting in the shower with it set to as hot as I can stand which seems to be 
`hot-6` now (interestingly down from where I used to have it  `hot-7` o `hot-8`).

I have been staying in the hot water for a few minutes to ensure the room is steamy and my body is sufficiently exposed 
to the heat. I use this time to apply shampoo and shower gel. Then when I am ready to rinse off I switch the shower down 
to the coldest setting `cold-1`. This does what you'd expect, sudden shock to the system, slightly takes your breath 
away, and then you quickly get used to it. I keep the water on the coldest setting for a couple of minutes whilst I 
fully rinse off. Then I switch the setting back to `hot-6` and let my body heat up again for another minute or so. 

Then I switch back to `cold-1` only this time the shock isn't nearly as bad. It doesn't take my breath away at all. But 
that's not to say nothing's going on, I've definitely noticed a rush of endorphins, an almost light-headed feeling of 
Euphoria. 

After a minute or so I switch back to `hot-6` for another minute and then finally back to `cold-1`. The final time at 
`cold-1` is very different from the first and second times. I've noticed that I barely notice the 
difference with the water temperature at this point. My body despite being blasted with very cold water is glowing. 
I feel like a human radiator. Even upon getting out of the shower where a few weeks ago I was shivering cold and my 
skin stinging and numb at the same time, now instead I'm radiating heat. My skin feels hot to the touch!  

I get out and get dressed to start my day. I'm wide awake, fully alert, actually buzzing. I couldn't consider not doing
this every morning now. Never could I go back to just having a hot shower.

Now I've been doing some research on what exactly is going on and whilst I could talk about it a bit it's not my field 
of expertise obviously so if you are interested in the science then check out the video at bottom of this post. Dr 
Rhonda Patrick explains is far better than I could :) 

I am now considering my next steps to up the ante some more. Sauna and Polar Plunge (ice baths) are the obvious final 
level bosses, but I don't have a Sauna or Polar Plunge at my house which makes this difficult. I have considered how I 
could do this at home. I'm not completely against purchasing an x-ray Sauna blanket, but I would like to assess their 
safety first. Something doesn't sit right with me about blasting my body with yet more EMF radiation... If anybody has 
experience using these I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on their safety. If I did buy one I could see myself 
going from the sauna blanket into an ice-cold bath initially, and maybe I'd look at buying a polar plunge or converting
a chest freezer to make one.

I'll let you know if I do decide to do any of this. Maybe I'll just find a gym that has both Sauna and Cryo facilities. 

I'm going to end this post now the same way as I ended the last one. Who even am I anymore? 😂😂

Hormetic Stressors - Health Benefits of Sauna and Cold Exposure

Ahh... Brrr... Ahh... Brrr!

![shower](/assets/images/blog/2022/06/04/00-cover.jpg)

Today marks the 9th day in a row that I've showered in cold water. Cold water, take your breath away cold water. I never 
thought I'd do this in a million years. I've always hated cold water. Even on holidays abroad when returning from the 
beach after being in the sun all day, my cold shower to cool down could probably be described as luke warm.

Over the last couple of years I've started to hear more and more people recommending taking cold showers saying they are 
good for your overall health, so I decided to look into and there are a surprising number of health benefits. 

# The Health Benefits

* Immune System
* Depression
* Anxiety
* Circulation 
* Soothe Muscles 
* Weight Loss 
* Hair / Skin
* Alertness 

# How I did it

My shower has 3 modes `hot`, `econ` and `cold`. In the past this mode has always been set to `hot`. With the 
temperature dial set to `7` or `8` out of `10`. On the first day I took my normal hot shower and when I was finished with 
washing I changed the settings to `econ` and set the temperature dial to `5` (we'll call this `econ-5` from herein). 
This was quite a shock to the system but I stayed there for a couple of minutes until I got used to it. 
Then I turned the temperature down again to `econ-1`. This was very uncomfortable and I think I forgot to breath for 
the next minute! 

I did this for the next day or so but reduced the `hot` temperature each time until I was stepping into the shower 
starting on `econ-5` and then reducing to `econ-1`. This is when I started to test myself against the `cold` mode. 
Starting my showers on `econ-1` and then switching to `cold-5` for 30 seconds. Now this really takes the breath away!
Each day I reduced the temperature again from `cold-5` to `cold-1` whilst increasing the time I stayed in, from 30 
seconds to 2-3 minutes. To do this I practised breathing, deep breaths in through the nose and through the mouth. I 
hated it at first it was very uncomfortable, but then I noticed something. I started to feel euphoric! 

Over the last couple of days I've gotten straight into the shower on `econ-1` then subjected myself to a couple of 
minutes at `cold-1`. Concentrating on my breathing the whole time. I get out of the shower now everyday feeling 
absolutely incredible. I feel high, yet hyper alert, wide awake ready to get straight into my work. I feel happier and
generally more optimistic.

The strange thing is I can't wait to get into the shower each morning. I actually now crave that cold water. So whilst 
I cannot recommend it enough, I do wonder who I even am anymore. 😂😂

It was this video that finally convinced me to try

Brrr

When you think of Dogs you probably think like most of us, that they are adorable and mans best friend right? You'd be 
right of course Dogs are awesome and almost everybody loves Dogs. How about Wolves? On first glance Wolves appear to be a
lot like Dogs but they're not. They're more savage and not domesticated. They are basically a raw, badass version of Dogs.
Wolves are what nature intended before Humans got involved and made them all pathetic and weak and unable to fend for 
themselves.

Why am I talking and Wolves and Dogs? I'll tell you why. Because I think what we did to Dogs we've also been doing to 
humanity and it's reached a peak level now. I think we need to stop and course correct before it's too late!

It's no secret that with each passing generation there is a feeling that the younger generation is a bit "soft" compared 
to the one that went before it. I know I certainly feel that way looking at the kids today, with their obsession with 
identity politics, woke cancel culture and safe spaces. They place complete avoidance of hurty feelings above all else and
it's not good for anybody in the long term. I've read a couple of great books about this subject if you want to understand why.

* THE MADNESS OF CROWDS - DOUGLAS MURRAY
* THE PARASITIC MIND: HOW INFECTIOUS IDEAS ARE KILLING COMMON SENSE - DR GAD SAAD
* THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND: HOW GOOD INTENTIONS AND BAD IDEAS ARE SETTING UP A GENERATION FOR FAILURE - GREG LUKIANOFF, JONATHAN HAIDT

## But what does this have to do with the Metaverse? 

I came across a few unbelievable articles this week in relation to VR and the Metaverse. These articles and the points
they are making had me facepalming harder than anything else I've seen up until this point.

These aren't just random internet articles either, the first one is from the BBC News website. The second from the World
Economic Forum. (Everybody that knows me knows I despise these two organisations).

## Sexual Assault in VR

[Female avatar sexually assaulted in Meta VR platform, campaigners say](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-61573661.amp)

In this "article" a female campaigner says:

> virtual assaults can be intensely traumatic

What you have to remember here is this so-called "assault" took place in Meta's (Facebook) [Horizon Worlds](https://www.oculus.com/horizon-worlds/)
VR platform. A platform not too dissimilar to [VR Chat](https://hello.vrchat.com/), only more cartoon-y and where your 
avatars don't even have legs. I mean look at this lot. Any adult that can assaulted in VR by this lot are in this 
position because this is how we've raised a generation. Preparing the road for the rubber, instead of the rubber for the 
road...

![avatars](/assets/images/blog/2022/05/27/00-cover.png)

The "researcher" then went on to say:

> "part of them was really shocked, part of them thought, 'OK, this isn't my real body, this is an avatar' and another 
> part of them thought 'this is really, really important research that I'm doing, I need to capture this footage'"

The article goes on to mention that other avatars in the area were making "lewd" comments.

Has this person ever been outside? To a real crowded location like a bar or a football match? I use VR a lot and yes 
sometimes places are quite annoying. Far too many young kids on VR Chat for example that make the experience unpleasant.
But the solutions already there, you simply highlight the person(s) that are annoying you, and you block them. They then 
disappear instantly. You can even configure any environment to only allow your friends in, or friends of friends.

Try that in real life.

I question how important this research is...

I'm sorry but people need to get a grip. We cannot continue to cater for the absolute weakest members of society and keep
normalising it. Read some of the books I pointed out earlier in this post if you want to see where it's heading. 

**Hint**: authoritarianism and a complete absence of personal choices and responsibility. 

## Metaverse Legal Issues

This article is what you'd expect from the WEF. On first inspection you might think they are forward-thinking and tackling
some tricky issues for the near future. But like everything from the WEF there is more to this than meets the eye.

So the [article](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/metaverse-legal-issues/) discusses a variety of issues that we
face as a society as we combine more of the real world with the online world. They begin by talking about NFT's (and I
think we can all agree that these have been a grift) and crypto/digital currencies that will power transactions in these
new online worlds. Fair enough. I don't particularly like WEF getting involved in any of this but obviously they will 
need to as they are the self-appointed global financial dictators of the world. 

Next they discuss data and regulations such as GDPR. Again to be expected nothing too wild to say about this section.

But then we reach the final section. 

#### User interactions 

> When users interact through their avatars, we may have situations where some kind of altercation occurs that would 
> equate to breaking the law, if it took place between people in the real world. Such incidents could be in breach of 
> tort law (which covers civil claims such as negligence or nuisance) or criminal law (involving illegal acts and crime 
> such as assault, murder, burglary or rape).
>
> Imagine one avatar assaults another. Could we apply criminal laws of assault and battery to this situation? How could
> we make an avatar responsible for their actions in the metaverse? This would be complicated, because it would mean that 
> we need to attribute a legal persona to the avatar, giving them rights and duties within a legal system; allowing them 
> to sue or be sued.
>
> Proving assault or battery would also be much more difficult because it usually requires “actual bodily harm”. In the 
> metaverse, there will naturally be no actual bodily harm. It would be challenging to prove harm, loss or injury 
> suffered by an avatar.

Read that last paragraph again. Sounds a lot like the nonsense the "researcher" was spouting about assaults in the 
Metaverse doesn't it? 

By their own admission it would be hard to prove as there would be no harm. **AS THERE WOULD BE NO HARM**

Is it just me? Or has everybody lost their damn minds? 

Stop the Metaverse. I want to get off.

CANCEL THE METAVERSE


![I AM LEGEND](/assets/images/blog/2022/05/21/00-cover.jpg)

Don't worry I'm not about to write a blog post about the boring old Will Smith movie from 2007, nor am I that narcissistic
that I'm going to title a blog post 'I AM LEGEND' and have it be about me :)

No today I want to highlight a particularly cool VS Code extension that I recently discovered.

I've been writing a lot of AWS IAM policies recently and if you know anything about AWS IAM it's that there are a lot of 
permissions. My usual flow was think about the policy, search the web for the AWS documentation page for the service(s) 
that the policy targets, and then scroll through the available permissions until I find the ones I am interested in. 

# Enter IAM Legend. 

This little extension does one thing, and it does it extremely well. Anytime you are writing an IAM policy statement it 
provides full auto-complete for all available actions and displays information on what each one does. 

![IAM Legend Plugin Demo](/assets/images/blog/2022/05/21/01-iam-legend.png)

You can narrow the list of options down by typing the service:

![IAM Legend Plugin Demo](/assets/images/blog/2022/05/21/02-iam-legend.png)

If you keep tying then it narrows the available actions down further.

![IAM Legend Plugin Demo](/assets/images/blog/2022/05/21/03-iam-legend.png)

And that's IAM Legend. As I said it does one thing and does it well. That said, I do hope it gets extended a bit, it 
would be nice if it could auto suggest AWS Service Principals too. 

The extension is also only available for VSCodium/Code, I do miss this when using my usual JetBrains IDE's.
In fact, I pretty much only open VSCodium to write IAM policies using this extension.




I AM LEGEND!


![CANCELLED](/assets/images/blog/2022/04/09/00-cancelled.png)

## I can't believe this hasn't been said before

There is real discrimination in this world. I feel ashamed that I didn't realise this sooner but a couple of days ago
I had an epiphany whilst stood in my kitchen. I was looking at kitchen scissors and I found 3 pairs. I realised that each
pair of was designed and produced exclusively for right-handed people. It turns out you have to make a special concerted
effort if you want to find scissors that are suitable for use by the forgotten left-handed people. 

In the year of our lord 2022 how can this be? 

It's a disgrace! We need to fight for change. We cannot continue to allow the right to be the default in the world.
Too much damage has been done already by these right-handed people. Just look at these monsters.

#### Hitler 

Responsible for between 12 and 70 million deaths.

#### Stalin

Responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

#### Donald Trump 

I'm sure everyone from the left agrees this man is literally the Devil. 

#### Jimmy Savile

Almost as bad as Donald Trump.

These are the people that this society thinks we should cater for by default?

To be honest I don't think cancelling right is going far enough. Whilst we are at it let's cancel the centrists as well. 
These people might be even more dangerous than the right. These people don't pick a side. They blend in and infiltrate groups
on both the left and the right. These people enjoy a lifetime of extreme privilege. We cannot continue to ignore it. 
It has to stop. It's not going to be easy, these people hide it well. They use either hand at any time to pretend 
they are just like you and share your ideals. It's a lie. Take a close look around some of you might have some in your 
friends group right now! 

Here's a selection of these sneaky Ambidextrous people. 

#### Maria Sharapova 

Very successful, very gorgeous Tennis superstar. She is Russian though, so obviously she's cancelled now.

#### Rafael Nadal

"The king of Clay". Another one of the most successful Tennis players ever. Winner of 14 Grand Slam Singles titles. 
This scumbag writes with his right hand and plays tennis with his left. You probably didn't even know.
What world is this kind of unchecked privilege allowed?!

#### Cristiano Ronaldo

Arguably the greatest footballer of all time. Can kick a football equally well with either foot. Puts his own records 
above his team-mates - Extremely Selfish. Such behaviour cannot be allowed in the future societies that we are building.

#### Mahatma Gandhi

Advocated Ahimsa (non-violence) all his life. This approach has had it's time. We need people willing to fight, loot and
burn down entire cities. Destroy inequality wherever it exists!

#### Ronald Reagan

The most hated US president of all time. 

#### Leonardo da Vinci

Famous for many things; painting, sculptures, architecture. A keen Scientist and Engineer but did you know he also 
invented the sniper rifle! - Kept that quiet...Coward

As you can see both the right and the centrists are problematic. The must be cancelled. The time is now! 

Still not convinced? Look at this list of glorious left-handed heroes.

#### Angelina Jolie 

Selfless humanitarian, adopts african children. Simply an Angel.

#### Babe Ruth

Americas favourite baseball player. 

#### Ben Stiller

2 words...Blue Steel.

#### Bruce Willis

Star of the world's favourite Christmas Movies. Yippee Ki Yay!

#### Eminem 

Arguably the greatest rapper alive today. Uses his platform and privilege to take swipes at power. 
That Trump Cypher at the BET Awards...World changing stuff for sure.

#### Gordon Ramsey 

Best Chef in the world. Revered around the world for his straight talking, no nonsense approach.

#### Hugh Jackman

Literally invincible. 

#### James Cameron

This man quite literally raised the bar.

#### Jimi Hendrix

Greatest guitar player ever. Black as well. Bonus points.

#### John McEnroe

Famously cool, calm and collected tennis super-star.

#### Judy Garland

THE original LGBTQA+ icon. A hero. 

#### Keanu Reeves

The nicest man alive in the world today. Maybe all-time. 

#### M.C. Escher

You won't find one person in the Northern Quarter that does not appreciate the fine work of this man. 

#### Mark Hamill 

An actual Jedi. 

#### Matt Groening 

A man so magical that he animates the future. He decides the lives and future of literally every human being on earth! 

#### Morgan Freeman

Whatever I write here. You're reading it in his voice aren't you....because he has the greatest voice on TV.

#### Nikola Tesla

This man essentially made this digital cancel culture world that we live in possible when he invented electricity. If 
only he had Twitter he could have cancelled that disgusting thief Thomas Edison.

#### Rik Mayall 

Legend.

#### Uri Geller

Israeli bender of spoons. We do love Israel.

#### Will Ferrell

He's kind of a big deal.

#### Obama 

This ones a bit controversial. Whilst he may have dropped bombs 365 days a year for 8 consecutive years. We have to 
remember that he was left-handed and a very well-trained orator, so I think all is forgiven! 

I could go on, there are many more left-handed heroes out there but you get the point. LEFT = BEST. It's the only choice
if we ever want world peace and a fair society. 

I know a lot of you will be right-handed right now but don't despair. If you now see the error of your ways and truly 
hate yourself and want to do better there is hope. You will need to publicly self flagellate to prove your commitment to 
the cause but if you pass the test we will allow you to transition. Surgery is optional, we would obviously prefer you 
to get the op and remove that evil right hand, but it's completely up to you. You are permitted to self identify as 
left as soon as you like. Many people do this and never get the op. That's perfectly OK. Remember: A self-identifying 
trans-left is still a left. We are proud to be inclusive to all the left no matter what your background.

I know this has been a long post, but I did it for anyone out there that has been suffering in silence. Hope it helps. If 
it helps just one person I have done my job. 

Please share this post and let me know if you want to arrange a Go Fund Me to help the cause! I wouldn't want to have 
to spend my own money.

Cancel the Right!

Today I'm not just writing a post. I'm going to give you a recipe and take you through my pizza making process from 
start to finish.

Over the last couple of years I've gotten deep into making pizza. Specifically Neapolitan style with high quality ingredients. 
I will obviously eat pizza in any variety it comes in but there is nothing better in my opinion that a simple, Neapolitan 
style Margherita. 

---

# Ingredients

## Dough 

* 497g Caputo Pizzeria Wheat Flour (Tipo 00).
* Caputo Semolina Wheat Flour
* 15g Marino Fino - Sale (sea salt fine)
* 328g water (room temperature, bottled mineral if you have it)
* 3g Caputo Lievito Dry Yeast
* Farchioni Il Casolare Extra Virgin Olive Oil

## Sauce

* 1x can Mutti Polpa Finely Chopped Tomatoes 
* Pinch of Marino Fino - Sale (sea salt fine)
* 1 tablespoon Filippo Berio Chilli infused Olive Oil

# Toppings

* Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino 
* Galbani Mozzarella Maxi (fresh Mozzarella)
* Fresh Basil leaves and Olive Oil
---

# Making the Dough

This recipe makes 3x 280g dough balls with a 66% hydration. 

First mix the flour and the yeast into a large mixing bowl. Mix this well so that it is evenly distributed
and make a small well in the middle.

![Pizza Flour](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/01-caputo-tipo-00.jpeg)
![Yeast](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/02-caputo-yeast.jpeg)
![Flour and Yeast](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/03-flour-and-yeast.jpeg)
![Flour and Yeast Mixed Well](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/04-flour-and-yeast-mixed-well.jpeg)

Next get your water and mix in the salt until it's fully dissolved. Then pour some water into the well you 
made in the middle of the flour and yeast in the mixing bowl. Mix the flour into the water until everything is 
incorporated.

![Salt](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/05-salt.jpeg)
![Water and Salt](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/06-water-and-salt.jpeg)

Tip the dough onto the counter.

![First Dough](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/07-first-dough.jpeg)

Stretch the dough and fold it and knead it for a minute or so. It will be very sticky but you're just trying to make 
sure everything is mixed properly. Now cover with the bowl and leave it for 10-20 minutes.

When you come back the dough will be less wet and sticky and the Gluten will have started to form. 

![Dough after 20 mins](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/08-dough-20-mins-later.jpeg)

Now you want to simply pick the dough ball up with both hands and turn and throw the ball back down on the counter. Do 
this a couple of times and the dough ball will rapidly change appearance until it looks like this.

![Nice Dough ball](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/09-dough-after-picking-up-and-stretching.jpeg)

That was with no kneading at all. Just picking the ball up, and folding it as I throw it back down.

Next grease up a mixing bowl with some extra virgin Olive oil and place the dough ball inside. Cover with cling film and
leave it to proof for an hour. 

![Proof dough ball](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/10-proof-dough-ball.jpeg)

It should double in side and look like this.

![Doubled Size 1](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/11-doubled-size-1.jpeg)
![Doubled Size 2](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/12-doubled-size-2.jpeg)

Now reshape the dough so that it's ready to split into 3 equal pieces. 

![Reshape Dough](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/13-reshape.jpeg)

Before you do this though take some olive oil and grease up 3x storage bowls that you will use to proof the dough balls 
in. I use the Ooni stack for this.

![Olive Oil](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/14-olive-oil.jpeg)
![Ooni Stack](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/15-ooni-stack.jpeg)
![Oil Ooni Stack](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/16-oil-ooni-stack.jpeg)

Note do not just cut the dough into 3 pieces. Instead, pick up one end with both hands holding it with your thumb and 
fore fingers and use your bottom 3 fingers on each hand to slowly tuck the dough into the bottom of the ball until you 
feel it's the right size. Then squeeze your index finger and thumb together to cut the dough and pull off a dough ball. 

Repeat this step until you have 3 dough balls. 

![Balls In Stack](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/17-balls-in-ooni.jpeg)
![Ooni Stack Balls](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/18-ooni-stack.jpeg)

Leave the Ooni stack out on the side for another hour then put it in the fridge overnight. The dough needs to proof in 
the fridge for a minimum of 12 hours. The longer you leave it in the fridge the better it is. I leave mine for days even 
up to a week, and it really tastes great!

# Making the Pizza Sauce

Pizza sauce for Neapolitan style is super easy to make. I simply pour a can of Mutti Polpa tomatoes into a bowl. Throw 
in a couple pinches of Sea Salt and add a tablespoon of Chilli infused Olive Oil. 

![Mutti Polpa](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/19-mutti-polpa.jpeg)
![Salt](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/05-salt.jpeg)
![Chilli Oil](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/20-chilli-oil-sauce.jpeg)
![Pizza Sauce](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/21-pizza-sauce.jpeg)

If you have fresh Basil leaves it's good to add a couple and mix into the sauce too! If no don't worry it's good to go 
just as it is. 

# Making the Pizza!

Now for the fun part. You've left the pizza dough balls to proof overnight and they now look something like this.

![Proofed Dough Balls](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/22-proofed-dough-balls.jpeg)

You will want to take your pizza dough ball out of the container and leave it on the side for about 60-90 minutes to 
allow it to come up to room temperature. 

Make a round pile of Caputo Semolina flour and place the dough ball onto it. 

![Caputo Semolina Flour](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/23-caputo-semolina.jpeg)
![Dough Ball In Semolina](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/24-dough-ball-in-semolina.jpeg)

You will want to pick it up, turn it over and put it down. Cover both sides in Semolina flour. Gently rub it into all 
the wet parts of the dough until it looks like this.

![Dough Ball In Semolina Both Sides](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/25-dough-ball-covered-both-sides.jpeg)

Make sure the bottom of the dough is on the top. Leaving the nice smooth side on the bottom. That will be the base of 
the Pizza when it's cooked and the funky looking side will be covered up by the sauce and toppings. 

Now cover the dough up with a mixing bowl and leave it for 60-90 minutes. 

Whilst waiting for the dough to warm up you will prepare the cheese. If using fresh Mozzarella it's important that this 
is dried out before you use it, otherwise the water will ruin the pizza and stop the base from cooking properly.

I take the Mozzarella and slice it up and leave it on Kitchen roll to absorb the water. Then I place back in the fridge 
until I am ready to use it. 

Note: Now is a good time to pre-heat the oven. Whack it as high as your oven will go! 

![Mozzarella](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/26-mozzarella.jpeg)
![Mozzarella Sliced](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/27-mozzarella-sliced.jpeg)

When you are ready to make the pizza. Press the dough in the centre with the bottoms of your fingers. Pushing the air to 
the edges so make those awesome big crusts. Turn the dough around and repeat. Then add pizza sauce.

![Pizza Sauce](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/28-pizza-sauce.jpeg)
![Spread Pizza Sauce](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/29-spread-pizza-sauce.jpeg)

Now before you add anything else put the pizza in the oven as it is, with just the sauce on. Leave in the oven for 5 
minutes and then take it out. This will pre-bake the dough, and it will start to rise.

When you take it out, add your cheeses. 

Here I added Pecorino and then my Mozzarella. 

![Pre Baked](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/30-pre-baked.jpeg)
![Pecorino and Mozzarella](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/31-pecorino-mozzarella.jpeg)

The final step and this makes it extra delicious is to use a brush and spread some Chilli Olive Oil all over the crust on 
the edge of the pizza and maybe drizzle some across the top of the pizza. 

![Brush Chilli Oil](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/32-brush-chilli-oil.jpeg)

Now return it to the oven for around 10 mins. Just long enough to melt the cheese on top. 

Wala!

![Pizza](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/27/33-pizza.jpeg)

---

You may have noticed that I cooked my pizza today on a regular metal Pizza tray. This was a mistake. I was seasoning a 
new Cast Iron pan today, and it was in the oven at the same time I realised I needed to put my Pizza Stone in the oven
to warm up. That's also why there was no pictures showing my pizza on a Peel or being fired into the stone in the oven. 
But I assure you my Pizza Peel and Stone game is way strong 😎😂. 

Maybe in another post.



I love this place for my fresh Pizza ingredients

I ❤️ PIZZA

I discovered something great this week. A little gem of a movie from the past that I had no idea even existed. The movie
is called [Idiocracy](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/?ref_=ttqt_qt_tt). 
Before I get into talking about the movie let's just consider how crazy it is that I wasn't aware this movie existed until now. 

The movie is by Mike Judge who's work I've been a fan of since I was a teenager, and actually probably a little before 
that! I used to watch [Beavis and Butthead](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105950/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) religiously. I even 
bought the comic books. I still have them hidden away at my parents house with my Beano collection somewhere. Then as 
time when on and Beavis and Butthead had run its natural course it was replaced by another fantastic animated 
series called [King of the Hill](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118375/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1). Years after this I was
a big fan of his movie [Office Space](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0151804/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) and more 
recently still another epic TV show he did called [Silicon Valley](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2575988/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1).

How did I miss Idiocracy?

In a way though I'm kind of glad I did because watching it now in 2022 feels like the perfect time to see this movie. 
No other movie I can think of comes close to showing my lived experience in this clown world we all exist in now.

Without spoiling the movie I'll give you the basic premise from IMDB:

> Private Joe Bauers, a decisively average American, is selected as a guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program 
> but is forgotten, awakening to a future so incredibly moronic he's easily the most intelligent person alive.

The movie premise is basically a warning that society is getting dumber and dumber all the time and the stupid people
are out reproducing the sensible people by quite a margin, meaning in the future we'll have nobody with any intelligence
left. Joe in the movie was a normal guy with bog-standard intelligence but when surrounded by the people in the future
he became Godlike. Watching him trying to explain the most basic of things to people and then giving up after they just
couldn't see it or understand the words he was saying had me screaming at my TV "this is how it feels!".

Whenever a person says to me something like: "I caught covid not long after my jab..." they might as well be saying
"It's got electrolytes".

![Brawndo](/assets/images/blog/2022/03/12/00-brawndo.jpg)

If you don't understand that reference watch the movie. It's a perfect reference.

But this is how I feel daily. I'm exhausted by it to be honest. Watching the mob moving from one subject to the next as 
the media shifts their focus from left to right. Nobody seems to ever fully wake up and realise the entire worlds a 
stage and the politicians, celebrities, even the Royals are all just playing their roles and their jobs are to deceive 
you.

We just finally got data released proving all the conspiracies were in fact true. The jabs were completely unsafe and 
ineffective, and they knew this and tried their hardest to seal that evidence for 85 years. We've had admissions fom 
the WEF themselves that they've infiltrated the cabinets of Governments around the world, and they are proudly pushing 
the narratives and lying to the people putting peoples lives in danger.
But does anybody even notice? Does anybody even care? If you try to talk about any of this with anybody they seem to 
answer only in sound bytes that they've had programmed into them through their TV propaganda. 

"I was sick with Covid. Luckily I was fully vaccinated, or it would have been so much worse..."

It's wild it really is.

Idiocracy

Back in June last year I added an RSS feed to the website so people could 
[subscribe](https://www.liam-reilly.info/blog/post/subscribe-rss) and keep up to date with my latest blog posts. Ever 
since then I've been manually updating the RSS feed and adding in each new blog post. Yuck! Today I finally automated this. 

The first thing I needed to do was construct an XML file. I used a library for this called 
[object-to-xml](https://www.npmjs.com/package/object-to-xml). This allowed me to construct the main part of the RSS 
document `<channel>`. 

```javascript
const channelObj= {
    channel: {
        title: "liam-reilly.info",
        link: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/",
        description: "Random updates, usually something I'm reading or thinking...",
        docs: "https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html",
        language: "en-GB",
        copyright: "© Liam Reilly",
        "atom:link": {
            "@": {
                href: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/feed.xml",
                rel: "self",
                type: "application/rss+xml"
            }
        },
        image: {
            url: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/assets/favicons/liam-reilly-info.png",
            title: "liam-reilly.info",
            link: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/"
        },
        webMaster: "admin@liam-reilly.info",
        lastBuildDate: getDateTime(), // (this function returns current date and time in format YYYY-MM-DDTHH-MM-SS
    }
}
```

Next I needed to convert the channel object to XML, wrap with the `<rss>` elements and write out a file.

```javascript
const o2x = require("object-to-xml")

const feedFile = "public/feed.xml"

const rssRootStart = '<rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0">'
const rssRootEnd = '</rss>'

const channel = o2x(channelObj)
const rss = `${rssRootStart}${channel}${rssRootEnd}`

fs.writeFile(feedFile, rss, (err => {
    if (err) console.log(err)
}));
```

So far so good, but it's pretty useless without any blog posts!

The blog posts on my website are actually [Markdown](https://www.markdownguide.org/) files. Each file consists of two parts.
At the top of each file I have metadata which is expressed as [YAML](https://yaml.org/) and is known as 
[Front Matter](https://assemble.io/docs/YAML-front-matter.html). I define many key pieces of information here such as the
title of the post, the date it was written, [Open Graph](https://ogp.me/) data and even affiliate links that relate to the post.

Below the metadata lives the content. All blog post content is written in Markdown format which is later converted to HTML on the fly,
as each post is rendered.

I have the following methods that read my blog posts directory.

```javascript
const fs = require("fs")
const path = require("path")
const matter = require("gray-matter")

const getAllPosts = (postsDirectory, fields = []) => {
    const slugs = getPostSlugs(postsDirectory)

    return slugs
        .map(slug => getPostBySlug(postsDirectory, slug, fields))
        .sort((post1, post2) => (post1.date > post2.date ? -1 : 1))
}

const getPostSlugs = (postsDirectory) => {
    return fs.readdirSync(postsDirectory)
}

const getPostBySlug = (postsDirectory, slug, fields = []) => {
    const realSlug = slug.replace(/\.md$/, '')
    const fullPath = path.join(postsDirectory, `${realSlug}.md`)
    const fileContents = fs.readFileSync(fullPath, 'utf8')
    const { data, content } = matter(fileContents)

    const items = {}

    fields.forEach((field) => {
        if (field === 'slug') {
            items[field] = realSlug
        }
        if (field === 'content') {
            items[field] = content
        }
        if (data[field]) {
            items[field] = data[field]
        }
    })

    return items
}
```

The next step is to get all blog posts, including any metadata that is needed to make up each `<item>` in the RSS feed.
Remember that the `content` of each blog post is Markdown and not HTML, so I use a library called `markdown-js` to 
convert the Markdown content to HTML.

```javascript
const markdown = require("markdown-js")

const buildItems = () => {
    const posts = getAllPosts(`public/blog`, [
        "title",
        "og",
        "date",
        "content"
    ])

    let items = []

    posts.map(p => items.push(buildItem(
        p.title,
        p.og["url"],
        p.date,
        markdown.makeHtml(p.content)
    )))

    return items
}

const buildItem = (title, link, pubDate, description) => ({
    title: title,
    link: link,
    guid: link,
    pubDate: pubDate,
    description: `<![CDATA[
        ${description}
    ]]>`,
})
```

The next step is to add this to our original piece of code that builds the `<channel>` object.

```javascript
const channelObj= {
    channel: {
        title: "liam-reilly.info",
        link: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/",
        description: "Random updates, usually something I'm reading or thinking...",
        docs: "https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html",
        language: "en-GB",
        copyright: "© Liam Reilly",
        "atom:link": {
            "@": {
                href: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/feed.xml",
                rel: "self",
                type: "application/rss+xml"
            }
        },
        image: {
            url: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/assets/favicons/liam-reilly-info.png",
            title: "liam-reilly.info",
            link: "https://www.liam-reilly.info/"
        },
        webMaster: "admin@liam-reilly.info",
        lastBuildDate: getDateTime(),
        item: buildItems() // <-- Adds the full array of blog post items
    }
}
```

That's it. I added it to the scripts section in `package.json`. 

```json
"scripts": {
  ...
  "build-rss": "node generate-rss.js"
}
```

Now I just need to run `npm run build-rss` before I publish a new blog post and moments later my rss `feed.xml` 
is rebuilt. Pretty 😎

I just wish I'd done this sooner 🤦‍♂️



Auto Generate RSS

Do you want free money? This is not a trick. Seriously, do you want free money? Allow me to explain.

![money](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/22/00-money.jpeg)

I use many web browsers across many devices. I do this for a number of reasons but the main ones are:

* Separation of concerns
* Development / Testing web applications
* Privacy / Security

For a long time I've used Firefox with the awesome [Multi Account Containers](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/)
plugin for my personal web browsing because it allowed me to sandbox particular websites and reduce their ability to 
track me across the web. If you've not used this btw take it from me, it's great.

For my business browsing I was still using Google Chrome because being a business customer of theirs it felt natural. 
Then I remembered about a Chromium based, privacy focused browser that I'd used years ago and forgotten about. The browser 
is of course [Brave](https://brave.com/). So I installed it and started to look around and see what had changed since 
the last time I used it. I found a feature called [Brave Rewards](https://brave.com/brave-rewards/). 

Brave via it's Brave Rewards feature does something that no other web browser does. It flips the whole internet 
advertising game on its head and allows you to opt IN rather than OUT of seeing adverts. Why would you choose to opt in
I hear you say and the answer is Brave pay YOU everytime they show you an advert. No longer is it just the ad companies
profiting off of showing you ads, but now finally that sweet sweet ad money is getting shared around with the rest of us. 
You even get controls to decide how many ads you want to be shown in an hour anywhere from 0 to 10.

> Edit: I should add that the ads that Brave Rewards shows you are also super unobtrusive. Ranging from background ads
> on the new tab page, to simple notifications. 

To enable this rewards system the Brave browser has a built-in crypto wallet, and they pay rewards automatically each 
month to your wallet using a crypto token called BAT which stands for [Basic Attention Token](https://basicattentiontoken.org/).
Now don't worry if this all sounds complicated it's really not, it's very simple to get going and only takes a few clicks 
to use the web browsers built-in wallet. I would however advise connecting the browser to an external wallet provider 
straight away. Brave supports 2x different wallet providers. [Gemini](https://www.gemini.com/uk) and [Uphold](https://uphold.com/en-gb/products/crypto).
You can link to either of these from within the Brave Rewards feature. See image below:

![Wallet Services](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/22/01-wallet-services.png)

> Warning: I advise you connect to either Gemini or Uphold as soon as you decide to use Brave Rewards. I left it until
I had accumulated over £30 worth of rewards which I wanted to withdraw and when I connected my wallet to Gemini I lost
all the rewards I had accumulated. Nothing transferred across. Lesson learned! Once your wallet is connected to either 
Uphold or Gemini you can forget about it and just let the money trickle in.

What's even better about this feature is that it's clearly designed to help foster a better internet where people can 
choose to reward or tip the content creators of the websites they appreciate. It's not just individual Brave users that 
can sign up for rewards but content creators and owners of websites can sign up too. I have done so myself with this 
very website.

Whenever you browse a website that has signed up as a verified creator with Brave Rewards you will see this little tick
in the address bar.

![Verified](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/22/02-verified.png)

When you click the icon you will a confirmation that the website is a verified creator and from there you can send a 
one-off tip, or you can even set up a monthly recurring tip.

![Verified Creator](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/22/03-verified-creator.png)

When I was deciding on which Wallet provider to use I basically just flipped a coin in my mind. I've been watching the 
rewards flow into the Gemini account each month automatically and without a hitch. This morning I decided to withdraw my funds.
The process was simple. I logged into my Gemini account and chose the withdraw option. I pasted in a Gemini address from 
my hardware crypto wallet and the tokens were transferred instantly. I didn't notice any option to withdraw the money 
directly into my bank but that's fine, I wanted the tokens in my hardware wallet anyway. I have since learned that Uphold
do offer more options such as converting your BAT rewards into different types of crypto and also withdrawing directly 
into to your bank. I expect I may switch my rewards to Uphold and write a post about this sometime in the future.

So there you go, that's how you get free money. Just don't forget to tip me as you're cashing out. 😎

🤑💰💸 Free Money 💷💶🤑

VR has given some of my classic games a new lease of life this week. More specifically [BigScreen](https://www.bigscreenvr.com/)
has opened up a fun new way to games with friends.

My girlfriend and I have been watching TV together in [Bigscreen](https://store.steampowered.com/app/457550/Bigscreen_Beta/)
most days recently as she's out of the country at the moment. With Bigscreen I can fire up some TV from my Plex server or 
YouTube, and we can sit and watch it together in various virtual environments such as grand cinemas, small home theatres or even 
out in the woods. It's a great way to still be able to relax in the evenings together and watch TV as if she's home.
If you've never experienced Bigscreen I can't recommend it enough, it's truly like living in the future. 

Anyway, so we were chatting away as the latest episode of Power Book IV: Force finished, and as I sat there staring at 
my computer screen in all its big giant virtual screen glory and I had an idea. Why not try and launch a game whilst 
Bigscreen is already running? So I found [Super Galaxy Squadron](https://store.steampowered.com/app/345860/Super_Galaxy_Squadron_EX_Turbo/) in my Steam library and
hit play.

Behold the awesome.

![SGS](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/19/00-sgs-cinema.jpeg)

All Bigscreen is doing when the Oculus is connected to the PC is mirroring the desktop to the VR headset and showing it
on whatever screen is available in the environment you've chosen. I was surprised how well this works. There was no 
noticeable lag at all playing Super Galaxy Squadron, and I was still sat next to my girlfriend chatting away, but she was
now watching the gameplay with me in real time rather than Power.

Pretty awesome.

So obviously I tried some more games. As I'm going through a bit of a Shmup renaissance at the moment I decided to fire 
up [Ikaruga](https://store.steampowered.com/app/253750/Ikaruga/) and see how that performed. 

![Ikaruga](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/19/01-ikaruga-oculus-home.jpeg)

It also plays perfectly and now my favourite way to play these games. The image above is the Ikaruga title screen
showing on the Bigscreen in the home environment. But you can play it any Bigscreen environment. Wanna sit down around
a camp fire with your friends and play it on a big screen in the woods? You can do that too.

![Ikaruga Woods](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/19/02-ikaruga-woods.jpeg)

So next I tried something a little more intensive. I fired up [Unreal Tournament 3](https://store.steampowered.com/app/13210/Unreal_Tournament_3_Black/). Which happened to be installed at the 
moment on my gaming PC as I introduced my lad to Unreal Tournament games last year. They are still so much fun and beat 
any modern multiplayer FPS for me.

![Unreal Tournament Title](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/19/03-ut-bigscreen.jpeg)

![Unreal Tournament Gameplay](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/19/04-ut-cinema.jpeg)

It's hard to see in those pictures but that's Unreal Tournament 3 on an enormous virtual cinema screen, complete with random
people sat in the audience. Performance was great again, and I won the couple of games I played easily. Still got it :)

There were some games in my library that were unplayable in Bigscreen. I tried [Tekken 7](https://store.steampowered.com/app/389730/TEKKEN_7/)
this morning and that lagged really badly. I also wanted to include the original Doom in this blog post. I re-installed 
[Doom 3: BFG edition](https://store.steampowered.com/app/208200/Doom_3_BFG_Edition/) so that I could load the original 
Doom from there, but it refused to show up on the Bigscreen screen at all. If you wanted to play these games on a large 
VR screen I suspect you could do using Steam VR, but I am only really talking about games that can be played 
comfortably in Bigscreen with friends here. I have previously played 
[Command and Conquer Remastered Collection](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_Remastered_Collection/) 
using Steam VR on a big virtual theatre screen and quite enjoyed it.

So there you have it. More reasons why VR is cool and opening up entirely new ways to game together with friends or on 
your own. If you haven't tried VR yet, what are you waiting for? Click the links below and jump in with me!

Classic Gaming in VR!

![upload](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/08-upload.jpg)

So I discovered and binged a new show over the last couple of evenings, and I have to tell you about it!  

If you've not heard of Upload yet, it's a new sci-fi comedy tv show from Amazon. It's doing pretty well over on 
[IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7826376/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1).

This is their synopsis:

> A man is able to choose his own afterlife after his untimely death, by having his consciousness uploaded into a 
> virtual world. As he gets used to his new life and befriends his angel (real world handler), questions about his death arise.

You might be thinking what I did... "hmm this sounds like Black Mirror" or more specifically,
"this sounds like a rip-off of the excellent Black Mirror episode: [San Junipero](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4538072/)" 
but honestly it's so not. Upload is so much more than that. 

It's funny at times, very funny, but it's also very dark and actually pretty terrifying when you think about how 
close we might already be from a technological standpoint to enabling the things demonstrated in this show. More than 
once whilst watching it me and my gf said things like "I'd rather be dead"!

Without spoiling it too much, during the show the people in the living real world strap on a VR headset and enter the 
digital afterlife. What made this even more creepy was the fact that me and my gf did the same thing. We 
strapped on our VR headsets and watched the entire show in VR in a virtual cinema using [BigScreen](https://www.bigscreenvr.com/).
It definitely gave the show an extra something 😂

I won't say much more other than if you've not seen it yet, watch it now! It's dope.

Upload

I recently ran into a pretty annoying bug with my Quest 2 headset when I was trying to install a new game. I noticed that
nothing was happening and when I looked at the updates queue there was a bunch of updates waiting to be downloaded and 
installed. The Quest said that one of my games (Rec Room) was currently installing an update but nothing was happening.
It was stuck and because it was stuck I was completely unable to install anything else!

I looked for ways to cancel the update but it turns out you can only cancel an update when it is queued or still 
downloading. You cannot cancel the update once the Quest has started to apply it. I tried to turn the headset off and on
again (you know the standard cure for every tech problem) but this does not work here. I was stumped. I searched online
for a solution but all I could find was people saying that a factory reset solved it. I really didn't want to do this
because I use an Oculus account rather than a Facebook account to sign in to my Quest 2 headset. To do this I had to 
follow the following steps the first time I used my Quest 2:

* Create a Facebook account  
* Sign-in to and activate the Quest 2 using the Facebook account
* Contact Oculus support (live chat on the website)
* Request that your Facebook account is unlinked from the Quest 2 headset and converted into an Oculus account
* Delete Facebook account

You can see why I didn't want to factory reset and do all of that again.

That's when I discovered [SideQuest](https://sidequestvr.com/). SideQuest is different things to different people but 
it's basically an alternative app store. I mean it's filled with all kinds of games and apps that you can "Sideload" onto
your Quest, hence the name SideQuest.

> Sideloading is just a term given to the practice of installing software onto your device from outside the official 
> channels which in the case of the Quest 2 would be the Oculus Store.

Using SideQuest it's possible to list out all the apps that are currently installed on your Quest 2 headset. However 
before you can use SideQuest you need to enable developer mode on your Quest 2. Thankfully this is quite easy. Simply 
open the Oculus app on smartphone and follow these steps:

* Click Menu in the bottom right of the screen
* Click Devices
* Scroll down and choose Developer Mode
* Toggle the switch to ON

![Oculus App](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/06-oculus-app.png)

At this point you will be taken to the Oculus 
[website](https://developer.oculus.com/resources/publish-account-management-intro/)
where you will need to create a developer account. You can find instructions for how to do this and how to install 
SideQuest
[here](https://sidequestvr.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SIDEQUEST/pages/698318849/Oculus+Developer+Account). 

Once you have enabled Developer Mode and SideQuest is successfully connected to your headset we can finally unblock 
the stalled update that is causing all the problems. To do so we need to search the list of installed apps for 
`com.oculus.ocms` as shown in the picture below.

![SideQuest Installed Apps](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/06-sidequest-installed-apps.png)

When you find the item click the Settings Cog icon on the right-hand side to bring up some options for that app that look
like this:

![SideQuest Installed Apps](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/06-sidequest-app-settings.png)

From here you want to click the Yellow `CLEAR APP DATA` option. Now reboot your Quest 2 and you should find the problematic 
update is no longer stalled and is now being applied successfully!

# Bonus content

I haven't done much more with SideQuest yet but I do plan to explore it more this year. I will probably write quite a 
bit about it as I discover cool things to play with.

SideQuest has an additional feature where you can send commands directly to the Quest headset. The Quest 2 is actually 
just an Android device much like a mobile phone. Because of this you can send commands using 
[Android Debug Bridge](https://developer.android.com/studio/command-line/adb) or `adb` for short. 

One thing that can be annoying with the Quest 2 is it goes to sleep pretty quickly if you remove the headset. This can 
be annoying if you want to quickly want to leave the room to get a drink or go to the bathroom or take a call or whatever
as it messes up your location and will require you to reset your position/guardian when you come back. I've found a great
way to disable this by sending a command to the headset using `adb` that disables the proximity sensor!

```bash
shell am broadcast -a com.oculus.vrpowermanager.prox_close
```

![SideQuest Installed Apps](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/06-sidequest-disable-prox-sensor.png)

Note; this only works for the current session. If you turn off your Quest 2 headset you will need to send the command 
again.

Oculus (Meta) Quest 2 Installer Bug

Friends of mine know that I've been a big fan of VR for a number of years now. I bought the Oculus Rift back in January
2017 and I've used it a lot over the years. Often for gaming on my own, but I've always enjoyed showing it to
friends and family whenever they visit. I will never get tired of showing people VR for the first time. They often react
in the same way with a childlike wonder and excitement. They usually say something like "WOW" and if I've decided to 
throw them straight onto a roller coaster they often also say "I feel sick" :) 

Over the years I've played many games and had many experiences in VR. Far too many to mention but some of my favourite 
moments would be:

* Flying X-Wings around a Star Destroyer in [Star Wars: Squadrons](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1222730/STAR_WARS_Squadrons/)
* Racing cars in [Project CARS](https://store.steampowered.com/app/429180/Project_CARS__Pagani_Edition/) (which is free btw)
* Screaming and laughing in terror whilst desperately trying to reload my gun whilst Zombies attack in [Half-Life: Alyx](https://store.steampowered.com/app/546560/HalfLife_Alyx/)
* Swimming and exploring deep below the ocean in [Subnautica](https://store.steampowered.com/app/264710/Subnautica/)
* Having my first Lightsaber battle in [Vader Immortal](https://www.oculus.com/vader-immortal/)
* Watching movies and sports in my own virtual cinema [Big Screen Beta](https://www.bigscreenvr.com/)

I've been doing all the above and more for over 5 years now but in that time VR technology has advanced quite a bit. I 
decided in December 2021 that it was time to upgrade my VR experience. I decided to buy the Oculus Quest 2 which is a 
big leap in quality compared to my aging Oculus Rift with much a better resolution and reduced 
[screen door effect](https://www.howtogeek.com/404491/what-is-the-screen-door-effect-in-vr/), which is quite bad in the 
original Rift but almost entirely gone in these new Quest 2 headsets. The other big feature of
the Quest 2 is that it's completely capable of working as a standalone device. Meaning you don't need a powerful gaming 
PC to use it, or be tethered to a PC either. You can take this headset anywhere you like and use it 
anywhere you like with the bonus that if you do decide to plug it into a gaming pc using a USB cable it converts the 
headset into a full-blown PC VR headset just like the original Oculus Rift! You get the best of both worlds. Freedom to 
use anywhere in standalone mode and the option to plug into a gaming PC for the full PC VR gaming experience when you 
want it! Always with much higher frame rates and quality compared to the older headsets.

The price is good as well. Just £299 for the 128GB model with a 256GB model available for about £100 more. But I don't 
think you need the 250GB model, 128GB seems more than enough. There is no other VR headset on the market today that is 
as rich in features, with such a high quality display and also priced so low.

I was so happy when I first used the Quest 2 that I immediately decided to buy another one for my son. Since then we've 
been using them all the time to hang out and watch TV together in Big Screen virtual cinemas. My son doesn't live with me so this
is great when he's at home as it feels like we're sat in the same room watching a show and talking about it as you would
in real life. I've raved about the Quest 2 and this experience with Big Screen so much that I finally managed to talk 
my girlfriend into getting one too. My gf is out of the country at the moment, so it's been great for us to be able
to hang out and watch TV or play games in VR.

This brings me onto a game called [VR Chat](https://hello.vrchat.com/). We are having so much fun in VR Chat. You can 
find just about anything in VR Chat. We've been playing Pool most nights after watching TV. We've even had a 3 player 
Mini Golf tournament with me, my girlfriend and my son. Honestly it's absolutely incredible I cannot recommend VR and 
VR Chat enough.  

![VR Golf](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/05-vr-golf.png)

![VR Pool](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/05-vr-pool.png)

![VR Pool Matrix Selfie](/assets/images/blog/2022/02/05-vr-pool-matrix.png)

What's great is VR is only getting better and better and the devices themselves are getting smaller and easier to use 
all the time. As much as I hate Facebook (Meta) they have made a giant gamble on VR, and they are doing a lot to push the
technology forwards. This can only be a good thing as far as VR Gaming and experiences are concerned. Please note: this 
is in no way an endorsement for Facebook and Zuckerberg with his dreams of leading us all into his totalitarian VR 
dystopian nightmare future.

It's going to be very interesting to see what Apple release too as rumour has it they are gearing up to launch a device
in the space soon!

If you're thinking now is a good time to try VR I can tell you that it most definitely is and I hope to see you in VR 
very soon!

I ❤️ VR

Phew! Just about snuck this post in whilst it was still January! 

I've taken quite a bit of time out recently as I was starting to feel burnout and decided I should take a break and 
catch up on some games and re-watch some old TV shows I love. So somewhere around mid-december I started to do just that.
I re-watched all of Gomorrah, including the movie and then binged the new 5th and final season. If you've not seen it I 
highly recommend it, it's absolutely amazing. Fantastic and brutal in equal measure. I'll include a link to it at the 
bottom of this post.

I also bought a new VR headset, the Oculus Quest 2 and yes it was still called that at the time and as far as I'm concerned 
always will be 😉. This was quite the upgrade compared to my aging Oculus Rift, and I've been spending a lot of time in 
VR ever since. 

I'm going to be writing about VR a lot this year as it's an exciting space, it's amazing to see how much
its developed already over the years and the pace is only going to increase over the next couple of years.

Timeout


![WTF](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/wtf-text-design-pop-art-styled-cartoon-acronym-exploding-background-105655505.jpg)

What's the last product you'd expect to find contains artificial sweeteners? If like me you said toothpaste you'd be wrong!

Another serious WTF moment for me this week was learning that toothpastes are commonly flavoured using dangerous artificial 
sweeteners such as Saccharin, Sucralose and Sorbitol. What's worse is this isn't a new thing either, it's been going on 
for most of the last decade at least. 

I've grown concerned about artificial sweeteners after hearing stories first hand about the damage effects they've had on 
the health of my personal friends and family. You've probably heard at least one story about Aspartame by now commonly 
found in Coca-Cola but I bet you didn't realise it was even in your medicines like Lemsip and now even your toothpastes!

I've been carefully watching the ingredients lists of most common products for a while now, and I've witnessed the 
artificial sweeteners quietly creeping into everything, but I had never even considered that they would also be used in 
toothpastes!

> Fun Fact:  Did you know that "full-fat" (non-diet) Pepsi now contains artificial sweeteners as well as sugar?  

For many years I didn't really give my toothpaste buying decision much thought. I usually went with one of the common 
brands (usually Colgate) and based my decision on price alone. That changed a couple of years ago when I started to shop
based on health instead of price. I wanted to reduce the number of chemicals and toxins in the products I consumed, and my 
girlfriend recommended a great natural product called BIOMED Natural Toothpaste by a company called SPLAT.

![BIOMED CHARCOAL](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ggy5rxni2z/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/3132/10254/charcoal__92527.1601336949.jpg?c=1)

I first made the switch to get away from the dangerous ingredients that I was aware of that were routinely 
used in toothpastes from the everyday leading brands. These include:

* Fluoride
* Polyethylene-glycol (PEG)
* Sodium Laureth Sulfate (SLES)
* Chalk
* Parabens

What I realise now which I didn't know when I made the switch is that not only did I cut out all the nasty ingredients
listed above, but I also managed to avoid the artificial sweeteners too! Bonus :) 

For example take Colgate Total. They state on their [website](https://www.colgate.com/en-gb/products/toothpaste/colgate-total-original-toothpaste-travel)
that they use 2x artificial sweeteners in this product.

* Sodium Saccharin. A non-sugar sweetener enhancing product taste perception. 
* Sucralose. A non-sugar sweetener enhancing product taste perception.

What they don't tell you is how awful these artificial sweeteners are, these offer absolutely no benefit to the human body
but may well cause cancers, brain tumors, lymphoma etc. The same can be said for the other dangerous ingredients like
PEG and SLES. Again nothing good for the human body, commonly found in anti-freeze and cosmetics and will only lead to 
cancers and other problems with continued use.

All the products which I show below are products I buy and use regularly and are free from all poisons mentioned above.

If you would like to try these natural toothpastes and mouthwashes for yourselves I offer these links to purchase from 
Amazon, they are usually available on Prime, so you can get the products quickly and cheaply if you are an existing 
Prime customer. I've only linked a small selection here, the products I've used so far and continue to use every day, 
but they have a much larger range which you can find on their home page which I've linked 
[here](https://www.splatoralcare.uk/) and also at the end of this post.

[![Charcoal Toothpaste](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ggy5rxni2z/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/3132/10254/charcoal__92527.1601336949.jpg?c=1)](https://amzn.to/3lMR5m6)
[![Honey Toothpaste](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0699/8747/products/biomed_propoline_1024x1024.jpg?v=1484782996)](https://amzn.to/31OIicx)
[![Well Gum Mouthwash](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0699/8747/products/biomed_well_gum_mouthwash_expo_1024x1024-gigapixel_1024x1024.jpg?v=1586092456)](https://amzn.to/3pHMMd9)
[![Super White Mouthwash](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0699/8747/products/biomed_superwhite_expo_1024x1024-gigapixel_1024x1024.jpg?v=1586087447)](https://amzn.to/31OJhJL)



WTF Toothpaste!?


![Image of fortune cookie](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DAD4MG/fortune-cookies-with-paper-message-dont-be-so-gullible-just-eat-the-DAD4MG.jpg)

I know we live in backwards clown world now and nothing makes sense and everybody is acting weird. Thanks to Social 
media we seem to have created a society filled with insecure narcissists that are desperate to fit in, terrified of 
standing out, and who would never stand up for something or go against the group. People are constantly seeking validation
from others, from imaginary friends in their phones. It's pretty grim and has some pretty terrifying consequences,
but I'll get into that another day. 

If you've read any of my posts though I'm sure you'll know I hate the Woke mob for many very good reasons, but it has also
given me a laugh recently. When you focus on the Woke+Vegan mob you really have to appreciate what has been achieved 
and recognise just how far people have fallen. It's beautiful if I'm honest.

For a long time now it's been generally accepted that processed food is bad and should be generally avoided, and 
home-made food is good and we should try to eat more of it.  Despite knowing this we often ignore this knowledge and 
instead we consume far too much of the fast food, ready meals and take aways.  We knowingly trade health and nutrition 
in favour of convenience, because we're ~~busy~~ lazy.

> But...what has this got to do with Vegan diets? - You. (probably)

You've probably heard the joke; "How do you know someone's a Vegan? They tell you!" 

Well one of the reasons they can't wait to tell you is because it makes them feel superior to you. It fires off a 
little dopamine hit and lets their narcissistic little brains feel all giddy. They feel great when they can do this 
face to face, or even better to a group but nothing and mean nothing feels better to one of these Woke arseholes than 
being able to broadcast it to the internet via social media. Oh the power.

![unlimited power](https://media0.giphy.com/media/hokMyu1PAKfJK/giphy.gif)

They will excitedly inform you that no animals suffered and they will brag about how much healthier they 
feel because wait for it...their food is "plant based".

![plant based](https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/010/692/19789999.jpg)

In a way I think they are right. I believe their food is "plant based". The plant being based in a near-by industrial 
estate. This is Vegan food but not in the traditional sense. No, this is what I find the most beautiful irony here. This 
food is merely heavily-processed, junk food. Mass-produced, chemical-laden, preservative filled products masquerading as
Vegan food. I don't care much for the food but this is delicious! 

Let's take a look at the ingredients at a popular "plant based" meat alternative product that seem all the rage with 
the Woke Vegan brigade right now.

![no chicken burgers](https://aldprdproductimages.azureedge.net/media/resized/$Aldi_GB/09.06.21/4088600263892_0_XL.jpg)

𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭 Flour, Water, 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭 Gluten, Mushroom, Fully Refined 𝐒𝐨𝐲𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐧 Oil, 𝐒𝐨𝐲𝐚 Bean Meal, 𝐒𝐨𝐲𝐚 Flour, 𝐒𝐨𝐲𝐚 Protein Isolate, 
Corn Starch, Chilli (2.5%), Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Cornflour, Salt, Paprika Powder, Yeast, 𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐝 Powder, 
Thickener: Methyl Cellulose; Raising Agents: Diphosphates, Sodium Carbonates, Potassium Tartrates; Cane Sugar, 
Yeast Extract, Black Pepper, Smoke Flavouring, White Pepper, 𝐒𝐨𝐲𝐚 Bean, Herbs And Spices, 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐭, 
Emulsifier: Polysorbate 80; Colour: Riboflavins

So what's bad for you out of this lot?

* Soybean Oil, Soyabean Meal and Soya Flour - Not good when heavily processed like this
* Methyl Cellulose - Not even digestible and often found in cosmetic products. Yummy!
* Mustard Powder - You probably don't want to consume too much of this, unless you like abdominal pains, diarrhea, and gut inflammation
* Sodium Carbonates - Can lead to respiratory tract irritation, coughing, shortness of breath, and pulmonary edema
* Polysorbate 80 -  Found to cause Colon cancer

I don't know about you but to me this does not seem to be the health food Cornucopia these Vegan types like to preach 
that it is...

This product isn't a one-off either. Go look at the ingredients on any of these meat alternatives. They are all awful.
I wouldn't put these products in my body if they gave them away for free.

They might not be healthy, but they sure do give you that self-righteous feeling that you're morally superior to others 
and that's what matters right?


Vegan, or just gullible?

You may remember back in June this year I wrote about a book I was [reading](https://www.liam-reilly.info/blog/post/troubling-times) called [A State Of Fear by Laura Dodsworth](https://www.lauradodsworth.com/a-state-of-fear).

![A STATE OF FEAR](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bae19878155122241cabd0b/1616511915987-J1JGDPRRA6EJ01GY8U3R/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kNQa-yP5tU6UpWN-P-Q7dtJ7gQa3H78H3Y0txjaiv_0fDoOvxcdMmMKkDsyUqMSsMWxHk725yiiHCCLfrh8O1z5QHyNOqBUUEtDDsRWrJLTmK-rtDVyS8lrwwDyo1SUQ5r0bHfK6lxahlhcDVEA_2l0xemIWRhl9A0JHzq0-bDiS/9781780667201.jpg?format=250w)

Well I came across an interview recently [Iain Davis Dissects the Pseudopandemic](https://odysee.com/@corbettreport:0/davis-pseudopandemic-720p:0) and as soon as the video ended I ordered his new book which is available [here](https://in-this-together.com/pnnt/). 

![PSEUDOPANDEMIC - NEW NORMAL TECHNOCRACY](https://iaindavis.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Psudopandemic-1.png)

I've read 8 chapters so far and it's a brilliant read, especially having already read the book from Laura Dodsworth. 
Both of these books are deeply researched, and every piece of information and claim made is backed up with references 
and links to the sources. I said after reading the first book that if everybody took the time to read this, then the 
pandemic would end overnight. 

Both of these books expose the levels of corruption and deceit that we are all being subjected to right now. They explain
step by step exactly how the lies have spread, why people are so afraid, who the key players are, and where it's all 
leading to.

It's a real shame that the majority of people will never take the time to learn how the world works and how we are all 
being manipulated and led to our own destruction.  

Too many people are far too trusting, and believe anything they are told as long as it's a recognised "authority" and 
coming from their TV. Worse still, it's always the most ignorant people that do the least research of their own that 
mock and criticise the few that do and try to warn them.

There is joke kicking about right now that sums this up perfectly:  

> What's the difference between a conspiracy theory and reality? About six months...

I won't go on, but I do urge people to take their heads out of the sand and pick up at least one of these books and wake 
up.

Every "conspiracy theory" that I've brought up with people since this all began in early 2020 has come to be and is now
very much part of peoples daily lives. How many more times before people accept they've been deceived?



Important Reading


![Picture from the movie The Many Saints of Newark](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/6157766c98f04d6502e9e8db/master/pass/Brody-TheManySaintsOfNewark.jpg)

# Oh, how I wish this could have been different.

My favourite movie genre? Mob movies. My favourite TV show of all time? The Sopranos. Put the two things together and 
you arrive at the perfect mob movie right? Evidently not.

I'm so disappointed by this movie that I actually don't know where to start. 

Let's start with the things I think this 
movie had going for it, the advantages if you will that David Chase had over any other mob movie writer.

The Sopranos, often voted the #1 show ever created for TV. A show that was so revolutionary and ground-breaking 
that it literally changed the way people thought about TV and ushered in the so-called "Golden Age" of TV. The show is
filled with characters that people genuinely love and know inside out after spending 86 episodes with them. The show 
that ended 14 years ago with so many original fans from the time and now all those new fans that have discovered the show 
since it ended. The hype was unreal for me after a 14-year hiatus! 

They had Michael Gandolfini. The real life son of the legendary James Gandolfini playing a younger version of the Tony 
Soprano character. What more could you possibly ask for in a prequel? 

As if that wasn't enough there was even a cherry on top for me. Joey 'Coco' Diaz was finally getting a role in The 
Sopranos. I've been a big fan of Joey and his comedy for years. I was made up when I learned he got a role in this movie.

So considering all the above I was beyond excited to watch the movie. It started off strong I thought with a surprise voice
narrating the intro. Christoper Moltisanti talking from beyond the grave. Immediately this conjured up memories of classic
Scorsese movies like Goodfellas and Casino. But sadly the narration stopped far too quickly. I think it was used 3 times 
in total. The start, the middle and the end. What a waste. Fans of the show were then forced to spend most of the rest of 
the movie trying to guess who each character on screen was from the original show. Christopher's narration could have 
solved this so perfectly. Then the movie gets going and things go from bad to worse. I've seen the movie twice now and I 
still don't really know what the plot was or the point of this movie. The movie seemed to be another victim of the 
current Hollywood obsession with Woke and instead of giving us a Sopranos story as advertised we got a commentary on 
Race riots and so many pointless new characters, one of which was Frank Lucas! Frank Lucas in a Sopranos movie? What? 
We had it already it's called American Gangster, Denzel nailed it. So much of the movie was wasted on these new Black 
characters that nobody knows or needed in the movie and seemed to walk into scenes and mock the wise guys as if it's 2021
with the current attitudes and culture. It just makes zero sense at all in a Sopranos prequel movie.

Putting that aside the movie really fails in its stated objective. This movie is supposed to centre on Dickie Moltisanti
and the influences he had on Tony Soprano which would eventually lead to Tony joining the life and becoming the boss we 
all know and love. I'd say the movie concentrated on anything other than that to be honest. We barely saw Tony with Dickie.
Tony was very young in the movie and nowhere near the mob life. Instead, we get a story of Dickie's love life and then by
the end of the movie he's dead. We barely saw him do any work. He definitely didn't do anything noteworthy that would 
have inspired Tony, and now he's dead so can't even rectify in a follow-up movie. (Please don't make a follow-up movie.) 

Remember how I said that the movie had problems with characters? How we couldn't tell who was who? Well get this. The 
movie focuses on Dickie Moltisanti. But also on "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti. A character played by Ray Liotta. As if this
wasn't confusing enough Ray Liotta dies in the movie, but then comes back as another character (Sal Moltisanti). So we 
have 2x Dick Moltisantis' and 2x characters played by Ray Liotta only one of which is "Hollywood Dick" Moltisanti who 
is also not the Dick Moltisanti we're told the movie centers around. MENTAL.

Drawing our attention to the Sopranos characters we do know. Junior Soprano. Absolutely wasted. In the original show we're told 
he was cunning and sharp and not to be messed with. Didn't see that in this movie, he did nothing at all except throw 
out the odd familiar lines. (Which I did like I won't lie). Johnny Soprano also wasted. Great in the scenes he was in, 
and probably the only character that seemed to have a attitude that fit with the time, but barely in the movie and does 
practically nothing. 

But that's nothing to how they wasted Michael Gandolfini. I'm pretty sure every Sopranos fan was dying to see Michael in
the role of a young Tony Soprano. To see him in those early years when he's just learning his trade in the mob. Instead,
we got a couple of scenes with him, in school, around the dinner table and getting into a little bit of trouble as a 
school kid. Absolutely nothing at all to do with joining or forming a crew. Wasn't he supposed to be forming a crew in 
this movie? Wasn't everyone expecting to see him and young Paulie, young Silvio, young Pussy etc. actually doing some gangster shit?
I know I was. Instead these guys seemed way older, and were already running with the older crew. I think this was Dickie's
crew? I assume it was. Rather than being Johnny and Juniors. But it's near on impossible to tell as nobody really did any
gangster shit at all in this movie, and Johnny as I've already mentioned, whilst being excellent was missing for the most 
part. In the end we didn't see anything that we expected or that was promised. We didn't learn anything about Tony and his crew or how they 
got together or why they were all so tight as a group. Then it ended. What a waste of time.

In the end there was very little I really liked about this movie. The one completely stand out spectacular feature of 
this movie was the performance of Vera Farmiga as Livia. She nailed this and stole absolutely every scene she was 
in and was the only person that ever made me feel like I was seeing a real character from The Sopranos. The only other 
person that did this in any way at all was Joe Magaro as Silvio Dante. I've seen people complaining that his performance 
was more like a Saturday Night Live skit or an impression of the amazing Steven Van Zandt original, but I liked it. At the
end of the day aren't they supposed to be doing impressions of the originals. I actually appreciated how similar he was, 
from the way he walked, stood and spoke.

If I had to pick a single scene from the movie that I recommend, that made me feel like I was watching younger versions
of The Sopranos characters it has to be the scene in which Tony and Livia are in the kitchen discussing medication. That
scene was excellent, and I do not remember any others coming close to topping it.

So to summarise I think this was a massive fail. A huge disappointment and not something I think they can even save now
with a second movie. This should have been an HBO TV series or should have simply concentrated on the Sopranos characters
and told a story that the fans wanted to see.



The Many Fails Of Newark


![critical thinking in a nutshell](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1617805735i/57658270._SR1200,630_.jpg)

Anybody that knows me personally will have heard me use the term "critical thinking" many times. I often complain that 
I think it's an important skill that is sadly being lost as the years go by. I believe there are multiple reasons for 
this such as the rise of social media and the decline in the quality of education.  

Our educational system has long taught kids to memorise things to pass tests rather than teach them how to think for 
themselves to solve problems.  Social media bombards people with propaganda, disinformation and fake news, opinions, 
and generally bullies and manipulates people to behave a certain way, or to engage in group-think. 

Neither of which are conducive to peoples ability to think critically on subjects.

I've often struggled to understand why so many people fail to apply critical thinking even to major subjects when it 
will directly negatively effect them as individuals. So I bought a book on the subject to try to help me understand 
why I think one way and help me find empathy with others that don't.

# How to define critical thinking

The book has a great quote early on:

> Purposeful, self-regulatory judgement which results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well 
> as an explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon
> which that judgement is based. - The Delphi Project

Which roughly translates to the ability to think about connected ideas thoroughly and independently, basing those 
ideas on factual evidence. To turn the full force of our reasoning towards resolving real-world problems. 

I had a eureka moment almost as soon as I started to read the book. I realised that the kind of systematic thinking that
is required to apply critical thinking to a subject is precisely what I do every day when doing my job as a Software 
Engineer!  Systematic thinking is how I've trained my brain to operate ever since I was a teenager.  When working on 
complex systems I often have to hold lots of information in my head at any one time about any number of disparate or 
loosely connected systems, and I have to be able to process how changes to 1 part of a system will affect other parts 
of the wider system. I cannot base my work on guesses or opinions instead I need to search out the truth, 
collecting only the facts to determine the variables and the outcome of my changes.

Sounds pretty close to exactly what the quote above was describing!

I believe it is because I do this so often and so naturally that I find it so easy to apply this type of thinking to other
subjects in the wider world. Including politics, business and relationships. 

But I now understand that most people do not think like this.  Most people are not constantly seeking truth, and it 
really isn't a priority in most peoples lives. Most people prioritise simplicity over truth. They want an easy life. So
they outsource their thinking and choose to rely on trusted organisations and institutions for their beliefs, ignoring
any biases these may have. I think
I understand this way of thinking now and why it's so common, but I do not recommend it or think it will end well for 
people that do think this way. 

It reminds me of a quote that I've repeated to people for so long that I've often considered having it tattooed.

> Ignorance is bliss, but only for the ignorant - Liam 

If you're interested in ways to improve your thinking I fully recommend picking up this book as a place to start. At just
over 100 pages I read it in a couple of hours. The books got a few great examples of well known businesses applying 
critical thinking to achieve success and explains two great frameworks 
[Paul-Elder Framework](https://louisville.edu/ideastoaction/about/criticalthinking/framework) and 
[Blooms Taxonomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_taxonomy) which I'm going to study in more detail to apply
to my own thinking and decision-making when strategising for my company [Alchemist Labs](https://alchemistlabs.tech)!

Critical Thinking

![Beer](/assets/images/blog/2021/09/10-beer.jpeg)

As I write this post today I am very excited. For the first time in ~18 months I'm actually going out for food & drinks
with my friends after work!

I've been out and about plenty throughout the entire "pandemic" period but this is different. This is the first Friday 
that has invoked the feelings of joy that I used to take for granted.  If I go back a couple of years, Friday afternoon 
office beers and then heading across the road to the pub was standard. Big up [Zuto](https://www.zuto.com/) :)

If you'd have said then that all that would change and pubs would close or that socialising with your friends would be 
discouraged, people would have looked at you like you were crazy. Yet here we are.  

Social life has literally been put on pause. Scrub that. Life has been put on pause. Everybody has just been expected
to sit and wait it out as if we're all going to get the time added back at the end. __Hint:__ *We're not!*

I won't get into that though that's another conversation. Today isn't about that kind of negativity. 
Today I choose to focus on the positive. Today I am happy and looking forward to seeing my friends and finally doing 
some living again!

P.S. The first rounds on me!

I'm going out-out!

# Society is a mess.

So last month I read the "The Coddling of the American Mind - How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up 
a Generation for Failure".  Whilst the book is American and discusses mainly American examples, 
I'm sure everybody is aware that the same issues raised in the book apply equally here in the UK.  The book looks at 
various aspects of modern society including the rise of social media, increasing screen time, overprotective parenting, 
the reduction in children's unsupervised play time, politics and more.  The end result of all of this appears to be a 
damaged generation of children that are not maturing at the same rate we did, and are completely unprepared and lacking 
the skills to handle college, let alone life in the real world.

We've all seen it, I wrote a [post](http://localhost:3000/blog/post/woke) about the current woke culture destroying 
everything just a few days ago.  I've read a number of books on this subject already and whilst they are all successful
in identifying the situation and provide examples of the damage it causes, none have managed to explain quite so well 
the how and why we got to this stage.

From the surface it's easy to see but difficult to understand the changes we now witness in society. Why everyone is now 
so obsessed with trigger warnings, safe spaces, and why people are now so desperate to be offended by literally 
anything and everything, and why we now seem to promote a general victimhood mentality. 

I don't want to spoil the book, but it focuses on what it calls the rise of "Safetyism".  There are three "Great Untruths"
which are explained in the first three chapters. The authors then continuously link to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) 
to show how these are damaging from a psychological point of view, yet how they are pushed in current society from college
campuses and in the media and wider adult world. Often with the very best of intentions but terrible results.  One of 
these great untruths is "what doesn't kill you makes you weaker". You can see this everywhere.  People so quick to 
misinterpret things and then take offence, that they try to "cancel" everything before it can hurt even their feelings.
People are trying to craft their own perfect little worlds, free of all risks.  It's just not realistic. It also becomes 
chilling when you apply "Safetyism" to wider society. Consider this paragraph from the book for example:

> Just as we were finishing this book, a head teacher of an Elementary School in East London issued a rule that children
> must not even touch recently fallen snow, because touching may lead to snowballs. "The problem is it only takes one 
> student, one piece of grit, one stone in a snowball in an eye with an injury and we change our view," he explained.
> That is the epitome of safetyism:  If we can prevent one child from getting hurt, we should deprive all children of 
> slightly risky play.

Sounds a lot like Covid right? Many people forced to close their businesses, lose their livelihoods, isolate from their
friends and family, cover their faces, trust proven liars with their health, ignore data, accept censorship and completely 
pause their lives because "if it saves just one life".

Now consider this quote.

> The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a 
> network of small, complicated, minute and uniform rules...it does not tyrannise, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, 
> it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and 
> industrious animals, of which the government is the shepard. - ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America

If you're not scared yet, it's because you haven't read enough to understand the wider picture.  But trust me, this book
is a great place to start! 

Coddled Society

I just wanted to share a quick update to say that I've given the site a bit of an overhaul. I've attacked a few of the 
layout and styling bugs that I discovered on smaller mobile devices.  I've completely re-written my blog platform.  

I'm now leveraging NextJS more and using the dynamic routing features combined with `front-matter` to store the blog post 
metadata in the blog post files, along with the content.  This is easier for me when adding blog posts, but it's also 
much better from an SEO perspective as this metadata is now available when sharing links to the blog posts.

I've also completely re-written a bunch of components I use on the website including the markdown renderer, and I've 
added [PrismJS](https://prismjs.com) so I can now write posts that include code with full syntax highlighting.

```javascript

const hasSyntaxHighlighting = true

const isCodeSampleCool = hasSyntaxHighlighting ? true : false

if (isCodeSampleCool) 
    console.log("This code sample is cool.")
```

I also improved the filter components on the [Blog](/blog) and [Books](/books) pages.  These are independent of each 
other now and have different implementations.  They also support more device breakpoints.

I haven't finished. I still have more features to add, including a photo library so I can finally get rid of Instagram!

These features will be arriving soon.

Website Overhaul

![Your Next Five Moves Book Cover](https://yournextfivemoves.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Best-1024x768.png)

I've been reading `Your Next Five Moves` by `Patrick Bet-David` for the last couple of weeks, and I finished it this
morning. It's a great book.

I've followed Patrick Bet-David online for a number of years now. I first came across him when seeking out
entrepreneurial content on YouTube and I discovered the [Valuetainment](https://www.youtube.com/c/VALUETAINMENT)
channel. The channel is amazing, a great blend of educational videos aimed at budding entrepreneurs as well as some
truly epic long form interviews with all manner of people, from business leaders, athletes and sporting heroes, mobsters
and more.

It sometimes feels like this channel exists just for me, with the educational videos and advice I need to help me and
then interviews with real life mobsters. What's not to love? :)

If you've not come across Valuetainment before I thoroughly recommend you check it out. It's one of my favourite
channels.

When Patrick Bet-David announced his book I knew I had to buy it, and now I've finished reading it I do not regret this
decision!

The book is filled stories and real examples of different businesses and situations that Patrick Bet-David has faced
during his life and career. Each one is broken down and the different angles are discussed helping you to see what works
and why, and what doesn't.

The real surprise though in the book is the inclusion of various resources and methods that Patrick Bet-David uses day
to day whilst running his business and working out how to assess various problems. I will be adopting and adapting many
of these methods as I grow my business and continue to learn and challenge myself to become a great CEO.

This book is filled with gems, and I will be re-reading it and coming back to it time and time again over the next few
years for sure. Throughout the book Patrick Bet-David references many books that he's learned from over the years, all
of which are listed at the end of the book.  He also lists 52 business books he recommends reading.  Guess I know where
my next books are coming from!



Strategy

## ~~WOKE~~ BROKE

This woke agenda needs to stop. It's literally seeping into everything and making everything suck. I really struggle to
understand why people are so keen to push it, and why they cannot seem to fathom the damage to society that it's
causing.

Actually part of what I just said is a lie. I don't struggle to understand why people push it, nor do I struggle to
fathom why they don't recognise the damage it's causing. It's quite simple really, social media and the desire to fit in
rather than stand out. The indoctrination begins now in childhood, in primary and secondary schools, then it's really
hammered home in college and universities.

If you don't believe me please don't take my word for it. Read
this:  [The Parasitic Mind - Gad Saad](https://www.regnery.com/9781621579595/the-parasitic-mind/)

Putting that aside it really does suck, and it's ruining absolutely everything.

For instance this weekend I watched the new HBO documentary
[Woodstock 99: Peace, Love and Rage](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15004156/). This is a documentary created in now in
the year 2021 about a music festival that took place in 1999. The same year I left high school. I was around 16 at the time, 
I turn 40 next year.

I was enjoying the documentary at first, that was until the commentators started to talk and the virtue signalling
started to flow. What they _should_ have been talking about was how the festival goers were completely let down by the
festival organisers. How the security was practically non-existent and how pathetic the facilities were.

Instead, they blamed the following:

* White Privilege
* Racism
* Sexual Exploitation of Women
* Evil White Men
* Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit)
* Anthony Kiedis (Red Hot Chilli Peppers)

I won't go into crazy detail, seriously give it a watch yourselves, but the Racism claims during the DMX set were
completely laughable. DMX killed his set, had the entire crowd eating out of the palms of his hands. The majority White
crowd I will add. They loved DMX, everyone did. RIP.

The documentary then attacking Fred Durst for doing a typical Limp Bizkit set at a festival is just dumb. Seriously
watch the Limp Bizkit set from Woodstock 99 then go and watch the one
from [Lollapalooza 2021](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8sU46LorQI)
and try to spot the difference.

I seriously lost all interest in the documentary very quickly. Trying to view a 22-year-old event through the lens of
today's culture of wokeness is just stupid. It could have been a great documentary, but instead they went woke, and it
was honestly awful to listen to.

Every aspect of the event was labelled, but what they didn't mention once was that for the most part, people were having
a good time. They were having fun. Life was very different in 1999. Life was fun, people knew how to go out and actually
enjoy themselves.

I am so glad that my generation got the freedom to enjoy life without worrying what everybody else might be thinking.

Woke Insanity

# Proud Dad Alert

This week I got to spend some quality time with my son Callum. It's his summer holidays from school (and his paper
round), and whilst he was travelling up to my house I sprung it on him that he was about to spend two weeks working
alongside me as my apprentice at Alchemist Labs. He seemed enthusiastic even before I said I might pay him at the end of
it :)

During the week Callum has impressed me time and time again. I've literally never been more proud. My face could have
exploded today as I was sitting next to my boy, seeing the smile on his face as he's doing my job! Building websites
using the same technology that I use every day to produce modern websites for the world's biggest companies.

![photo of callum](/assets/images/blog/2021/08/06-apprentice-coding.png)

I've been helping Callum get into coding for a couple of years now. I noticed he was enjoying coding at school far more than
anything else. Many times he's come home to tell me about some coding he's been doing. One weekend he even re-created a
racing game he made at school from memory, so that weekend I decided it was a good time to introduce him to web
development. I signed him up to Codecademy, and he jumped into some free courses on `HTML`, `CSS` and `Javascript`.

He kept this up and completed the free courses, and was making good progress on the Javascript course which he couldn't
then complete on the free subscription, so I offered to buy him a Codecademy Pro license and challenged him to complete
the `Full-Stack Software Engineer` career path learning `Javascript`, `Node`, `SQL`, `React`, `TDD` and more.

He's been steadily working his way through the Codecademy stuff, but I don't think that can prepare anybody for the
amount of things that you experience day to day in the real world.

For instance his first 5 days covered all of this, plus more that isn't even mentioned here!

### Monday

* Induction
* SSH Keys
* Kanban Board
* User Stories + Cards
* Version Control (GIT)
* Coding (React, JSX, Markdown)

### Tuesday

* Agile 
  * Kanban
  * Scrum
* Lean
* Market Research

### Wednesday

* React / NextJS
* Styling
    * CSS Modules
    * styled-components
* Scaffolding a new website using `create-next-app`,
* Whiteboarded design ideas for new website components

### Thursday

* Built website components
    * Layout
    * Header
    * YouMightLike
    * Body
    * Footer

### Friday

* Training (Codecademy)
* 10% Time (Building his own website, using the skills he'd learned during the previous 4 days)

Before springing the apprenticeship surprise on him, I had put a lot of thought into how the experience might go and
whilst I hoped he had the same genuine love for coding that his Dad has, I had also considered a backup plan of sending
him home to pursue his other dream, sitting at home, playing computer games and doing very little else. Imagine my
surprise this evening when I informed Callum that it was 8:30 PM on a Friday night, and I wanted him to close his laptop
and come and play Mario with me, and he replied "Give me a minute, I just want to fix this one thing". It was at this
moment that I knew that he had got the bug and was a chip off the old block.

From what I've seen in the last 5 days (more like 4.5 days if you consider the fact that Callum got no sleep on the
Wednesday night but soldiered on anyway) I truly believe that he has coding in his blood. I know that if this is the path he chooses to
take, that he will be a great apprentice, and who knows, one day he may even take the reins from me and run Alchemist
Labs.

![photo of callum](/assets/images/blog/2021/08/06-apprentice.jpg)

### TLDR:  Proud of you son!

My Apprentice

If you know me personally you'll know that my favourite TV show of all time is The Sopranos. There is no greater TV
show.

On the bookshelf in my office you'll find my prized possession.

![the sopranos blu-ray box set](/assets/images/blog/2021/07/29-sopranos-boxset.png)

I've never been one of those people that gets deeply affected by celebrity deaths. I'm only good at emotional stuff if I
know people, and only then if they are really close to me. That said, it really hit me hard in the feelings when I first
heard about the unexpected and shock death of James Gandolfini.

I've been a fan of James Gandolfini forever. I've seen nearly every performance, from Virgil in True Romance through
Cousin Marv in The Drop. As good as his movie characters and performances were they were nothing compared to his TV
performance in The Sopranos.

James Gandolfini was born to play Tony Soprano.

I cannot tell you how many times I've watched this show from start to end. This show is special. There are so many
amazing characters in this show. Ask any Sopranos fan to pick their favourite characters, and I bet you get different
answers every time.

I love so many of the characters in this show, Paulie 'Walnuts' Gualtieri (Tony Sirico) definitely deserves a special
mention, but my favourite characters were Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) & Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt). 

I've been searching for some artwork for my office for around 2 years now.  Today I finally hung this:

![the sopranos wall art](/assets/images/blog/2021/07/29-sopranos-art.png)

I agonised for a long time over this decision, but ultimately this was the perfect choice.  My two favourite characters,
Tony smiling, counting money and Silvio doing the Godfather impression that makes me laugh so much. 

My office is now complete. I mean...Look at it! 

![the sopranos wall art again](/assets/images/blog/2021/07/29-sopranos-awesome.png)


The Sopranos

# RANT INCOMING

Is anybody else getting tired of paying for services and then being expected to pay again? It's getting to the point now
where I feel like half the subscription services I pay for merely buys me the opportunity to pay them again to get
access to the thing I thought I'd already paid for.

You see it everywhere now. Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Apple TV. You subscribe to them all in good faith and then when
they release a new Movie or TV Show and _WHAM_, you need to pay them even more money to rent/buy it.

**I'm sick of it.**

This week Spotify have pushed me too far with the double-dipping. I've been a loyal paying customer of Spotify for years
now, as you can see below:

![my premium subscription status](/assets/images/blog/2021/07/27-spotify-1.png)

I've paid for Premium for years on the basis that I can enjoy my content without interruptions from advertisers. For the
longest time they held up their end of the bargain. I have enjoyed many hours of content without hearing from an
advertiser.

Sadly all that changed when they brought the Joe Rogan Experience to the platform. At first, I noticed I was hearing the
odd advert when starting to play certain episodes of the podcast. It seemed to be infrequent, certainly not before every
episode I chose. Then it became every episode. Whilst this did annoy me I tried to ignore it and simply turned down the
volume on my device until the advert had stopped, and I could see that the episode had begun.

Now Spotify has started to interrupt podcasts less than an hour in, to pause the podcast and start playing ads. It
starts with Joe Rogan reading ads himself, and then continues with generic Spotify adverts. The ones the consumers of the 
free product offering are subject to.  The best part, if you close the Spotify app and re-open, it's lost the position 
you were up to and simply says you've finished the episode.

This is no longer a premium service.  This is blatant false advertising, and at the very least you've lost me as a paying 
customer.

![my cancelled subscription status](/assets/images/blog/2021/07/27-spotify-2.png)

I think this might be the first domino to fall.  I'll be reconsidering my other subscriptions in the coming weeks.

Spotify

I've updated the books section of the website today.  But today's update is a little different.  Instead of just adding 
the latest book I chose from my bookshelf, I've added two books!  That's right I'm currently reading two books at the 
same time.  Two's better than One right?

The first book I'm reading (my early morning treadmill book if you will) is:
# THE MAGIC OF THINKING BIG

![the magic of thinking big](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn2.penguin.com.au%2Fcovers%2Foriginal%2F9781785040474.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)

I've read a few chapters so far, and it's absolutely packed with practical advice on how to tweak and improve your 
mindset.  It really challenges you to question how you approach a situation and then suggests a better way to tackle 
that situation instead.  I can tell already I'm going to take a bunch of ideas away from this book to ensure that I 
keep my mindset where it needs to be.  There is a magic that comes with a positive, can-do attitude that negative people
will never realise. 

The second book I am reading is:

# The Lean Product Playbook.

![the lean product playbook](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.evbuc.com%2Feventlogos%2F351651%2Fleanproductplaybook.jpg&f=1&nofb=1)

I've probably read about a third of this book so far.  This book feels like one of the most important books I've ever 
picked up, directly relating to my field of work.  

I've been applying Lean to software development for many years already, 
in a variety of different companies that I've worked for across many computer systems, in various stages of 
their development.  This time though, I'm doing it on my own.  I'm building my own products for my own company and this 
books absolutely filled with useful, actionable advice and formulas for success.  It feels like there is something 
incredible to be found in each page.


Two Twos

Back in April I read a great book called **Be More Pirate** by Sam Conniff.

I will be honest I bought the book largely based on the cover alone.

![be-more-pirate](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a82fe8132601efb6c80a467/1554105586200-BEPZP5S01S8MLBASCQBH/BeMorePirate_3.jpg?format=1000w)

Isn't it great?

Thankfully the contents of the book are great too, and it really lived up to the awesome front cover. Dispelling the
myth that "you can't judge a book by its cover". I enjoyed this book so much I was telling everybody about it.

I've always been rebellious by nature. I don't do things just because that's the "done" thing, or the way it's always
been done.  I question everything and prefer to trust my own judgement and instincts rather than blindly accept what I'm being told
without doing my own research first. So I think I'd make a pretty good pirate and like Steve Jobs said "I'd rather be a
pirate than join the navy".

The book is full of surprising facts about the many things pirates did that helped shape a better and fairer society.
Not what you would expect based on the image pirates have in the world today, but honestly you owe more to pirates than
you might think!

I won't spoil the book but if you're starting a business, searching for a good cause or more meaning in your life or
simply want to learn more about pirates, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

So when I saw there was a new book out I had to buy it immediately.

![how-to-be-more-pirate](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a82fe8132601efb6c80a467/1601843163239-ZYI6HDYB0ZFX13AYTJXO/HTBMPPage3+%281%29.jpg?format=1000w)

I have high hopes for this book.  The cover is still really striking when you see it in person.  I just hope the content
is as exciting.  It's not written by Sam this time, but instead by Alex who was hired to help Sam manage the success 
that the first book brought.  This book is the story of how the book became a movement and shares the stories of 
individuals and businesses that embraced it.



Be More Pirate

# STEAM DECK... OR SWITCH PRO?

#### AM I RIGHT 🤣

Joke; I'm right. I mean look at it.

![steam deck](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamdeck/images/steamdeck_photo_skus.png)

Jokes aside I want one of these. It looks amazing.  

I am fortunate enough to own a very nice gaming PC, as well as multiple consoles, but I have more gaming options than I 
have time.  With the way modern gaming has gone with the constant updates and operating system upgrades I find I really
have to commit to gaming these days if I'm going to be gaming on my PC or a console.

The one console I do find myself using a lot though is my Nintendo Switch which I bought earlier in the year.  I love the
flexibility of that device.  I love that I can just pick it up jump into a quick game immediately and I love that I can 
do this anywhere.  In the office, in the kitchen and even in bed.

So when Valve shocked everyone and announced the Steam Deck I was very interested.  The idea that I will be able to 
play my PC games on my PC when I have more time, but I will also be able to quickly pick them up and take them with me 
sounds perfect. Especially for us older gamers that have more of life's responsibilities getting in the way!

Everything about this device sounds great. The flexibility expands far beyond being able to pick up and play.  It's a full
blown PC.  You can dock it to a screen, a keyboard/mouse, a fight stick, even your AirPods if you want.  You can use other
gaming stores such as Epic or you can wipe the device entirely and install another OS.  

It's a unique and refreshing change from the usual locked down default position of other vendors. Looking at you Apple.

The pricing and range of SKUs seems to have something for everyone too.  Not sure which one I'll go for yet, either the 
middle or the top end but even the cheapest option is only limited by storage space/speed, and the storage is exandable
with SD cards anyway. 

It's a very exciting device, and I am very excited if you can't tell :) 

Steam Deck

Anybody that knows me knows that I've always been a huge fan of 50 Cent. I can still remember where I was sat that
Friday night back in 2003 whilst listening to Tim Westwood when he played practically every track off of his album **Get
Rich or Die Tryin**. A few months later I was watching him perform the album live on the tour of the same name, here in
England. I still listen to that album today and enjoy it just as much as I did all those years ago.

Since then 50 has continued to evolve and has seemed to print money with one successful business after another and there
is probably a generation of kids now that only know him for making hit TV shows.

So following on from reading the autobiographies of Phil Knight (NIKE) and Ray Kroc (McDonalds)
what better book could there be for me to read other than 'Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter by Curtis (50 Cent) Jackson':

![picture of the cover art for the book Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter by Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson](https://images.isbndb.com/covers/38/27/9780062953827.jpg)

I've actually read 5 chapters already, and it's incredible, but I knew it would be because I'd already had a glimpse
into the way Curtis Jackson operates from reading **The 50th Law** earlier in the year. That book was written
collaboratively by the legendary Robert Greene (The 48 Laws of Power) and 50 Cent.

This latest book really does show you behind the curtain, breaks down previous business deals and shares many of his
secrets and explains the way his mind works and how yours should too, if you want to succeed in life.

I can't wait to read the 2nd half of the book!

Hustle Harder. Hustle Smarter

As you might know from my previous [post](https://www.liam-reilly.info/blog/post/mcdonalds) I recently read the
autobiography of Ray Kroc and how he built the McDonalds corporation. I enjoyed this book a lot!
I told my girlfriend Fleur that I enjoyed this book more than any other book I'd read in my
life.

It's hard to imagine a world without McDonalds now, they are literally everywhere all over the
world, but you just don't really think about how that happened, or the extraordinary hard work,
persistence, risk taking, deal making etc that it took for this to come to be. Ray Kroc
explained all of this in so much detail, and it's absolutely inspiring and motivating, and it's
true what they say "hard work pays off".

So I went back to my bookshelf to choose my next book and it suddenly seemed obvious that my next
read should be **Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE**.

![picture of the cover art for the book Shoe Dog by Phil Knight](https://images.isbndb.com/covers/67/01/9781471146701.jpg)

I've read a couple of chapters so far and whilst the backgrounds of the two men (Ray Kroc and
Phil Knight) are very different, the lessons and stories in the book are the same. They both
have the same self belief, the same wish to build something big for themselves, and the same
dogged determination to succeed. They both started with nothing and took chances and risked it
all until eventually they became two of the most successful entrepreneurs in history!

So I read these stories everytime self-doubt starts to creep in or if I am wondering if I'm wasting my
time or making a mistake in my business. I remind myself that mistakes are fine, as long as you
keep going.

Every business starts with an idea (or in my case with one man and hundreds of ideas) but if you
keep going, moving forward every day who knows where it will end up?

Swoosh!

# My Apple AirPods Pro just went from hero to zero in no time...

Let me start by saying I've been a massive fan of my Apple AirPods for years now. I had a pair of
the originals which I used daily for a year or so and I upgraded to the AirPods Pro in September 2020.

I absolutely loved my original AirPods and recommended them to people all the time. I had mixed
feelings when I upgraded to the AirPods Pro, as I wasn't a huge fan of the Silicon tips. Seemed
like a step backwards to me, and I found the originals sat in my ear much more comfortably. But I
soon got used to them and appreciated the new noise cancellation features.

Recently however I noticed my ears were extremely sore. They were sore to the touch, I noticed
this when cleaning them. I also noticed that my ears seemed very waxy later on in the day which
is very unusual and something that isn't normally a problem. Finally, I noticed my ears started
to become flaky as well as sore.

I stopped using my AirPods Pro immediately at this point and went back to the wired headphones
that came with my iPhone. My ears quickly healed and returned to normal. So I tried the AirPods
Pro again. I listened to music for an hour or so and took a couple of phone calls. I then
removed them and waited to see if the ear problems would return over the next day or
so...**they did!**

I have now repeated this same test on three separate occasions, weeks apart. Each time my ears
were perfectly normal, and I'd only used wired earphones. Each time a day or two after using the
AirPods Pro my ears would develop sores, flakes and all that good stuff.

![picture damage caused to my ear by airpods pro](/assets/images/blog/2021/06/29-airpods.jpg)

I've searched online and I've seen people reporting the same issue. Many are suggesting that the
problem is an allergic reaction to the Silicon tips, but I do not think this is the true cause. I
wore these for months without a problem. This is a problem that has developed very recently.

I have theories as to what is causing this, but I don't want to talk openly about these yet. I
will try some alternative tips and see if that helps.

I hope this isn't caused by what I think it is though as it's getting next to impossible to find
wired alternatives these days, and I expect pretty soon there will be no wired alternatives in
production at all.

Apple AirPods No :(

I recently watched a movie that I randomly found on Amazon Prime called 'The Founder'. I knew
nothing about it going in and ended up enjoying it immensely. The movie tells the true story of
the earliest days of Mcdonald's and how it came to be the multinational juggernaut that it is
today. If you've not seen it I definitely recommend it, and I will try to avoid spoilers in this
post.

As an ambitious business owner myself I was particularly intrigued by a character in the movie
called Ray Kroc who was played brilliantly by Michael Keaton.

A few weeks after watching the movie I was searching online for various entrepreneurial books,
particularly autobiographies when I came across **Grinding It Out** by the man
himself Ray Kroc.

![picture of the book Grinding It Out by Ray Kroc](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1379150499l/498886.jpg)

So this is my current read. I'm very excited to read the story in more detail and to pick up some
hints/tips and motivation to keep me focused on my goals.

If you've not seen The Founder check it out on 

The Founder!

I was thinking as I am now posting to this website more often it might be a good idea to add a
feed.

I've added a simple RSS 2.0 feed to the website now. The permanent link can be found in the
footer of the page.

You can also subscribe using this link to the RSS feed 

Subscribe

> Dare to think for yourself - Voltaire

We are truly living through troubling times right now. Life has been pretty good in my lifetime.
No world wars or even civil wars in England at least. It's my belief that this changed in 2019.

When you think of wars you probably think of tanks, bombs and fighting. This is how wars are
fought right? This is how traditional wars **were** fought!

It's my honest belief we are currently living through World War 3 but because the style has
changed most people just don't realise it's begun.

Wars are waged in secret. Corruption, propaganda and never ending marketing of fear are all
that's required to defeat the enemy. That enemy is you and me!

Over the last year I've spent far too much time closely observing the never ending propaganda in
this country (England) and abroad including the US, Canada, France and more. I've seen world
leaders tell lie after lie, move goal post after goal post whilst peoples lives have been
becoming increasingly worse.

At first glance it may appear like every country is acting independently and making its own rules
but this simply isn't true at all. It's the same playbook everywhere with only minor
differences.

It's quite overwhelming trying to work out what's happening and where we are heading next with
big tech routinely censoring information but finally I've found a good book that helps us
understand what's going on, certainly in England.

# A State Of Fear - Laura Dodsworth

![front cover of book A State Of Fear](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5bae19878155122241cabd0b/1616511915987-J1JGDPRRA6EJ01GY8U3R/ke17ZwdGBToddI8pDm48kNQa-yP5tU6UpWN-P-Q7dtJ7gQa3H78H3Y0txjaiv_0fDoOvxcdMmMKkDsyUqMSsMWxHk725yiiHCCLfrh8O1z5QHyNOqBUUEtDDsRWrJLTmK-rtDVyS8lrwwDyo1SUQ5r0bHfK6lxahlhcDVEA_2l0xemIWRhl9A0JHzq0-bDiS/9781780667201.jpg?format=250w)

As soon as I saw this book I knew I had to read it! Today I've read the first four chapters and
right from the introduction Laura provides data and facts which have been completely and
deliberately missing from the media and Government updates.

I will be flying through this book over the next few days, and then I will be sending copies out
to friends/family. It's truly a book I think everybody **needs** to read!

Whether you want to admit it or not, things are far from normal right now and if you ever want
your old normal to return you need to learn how you're being manipulated and learn how to fight
back! You need to learn to think for yourself!

I urge you to pick up a copy and give it a read!

Troubling Times

Another new month, another book delivery. I swear I will not purchase any more books for the rest
of the year now!

I started the year with a handful of physical books scattered around my house but when I decided
to improve my home office, a bookshelf was top of the list of things I needed to buy. I grossly
overestimated the number of books I owned and built a bookshelf floor to ceiling which looked
embarrassingly bare when I put my handful of books on the shelves!

Fast forward a few months and it's now looking much healthier with 70+ books on the shelf
currently with a couple more books still due to arrive.

I finished reading my current book 'The Parasitic Mind: How infectious ideas are killing common
sense' by the wonderful Gad Saad this morning and I have to say I think this book should be
required reading in every high school and college/university. I cannot praise this book highly
enough and thoroughly recommend you grab a copy today. Society depends on it! It really is that
good.

A number of new books were delivered which I'm looking forward to reading but as I sat at my desk
looking over them all I found myself automatically reading the complete overture section of
'Beyond Order' by the equally fantastic Jordan B. Peterson and with that subconsciously I
decided my next read.

I'm quite happy that it worked out this way to be honest. My recent reading order has been as
follows:

- **Jordan B. Peterson** - 12 Rules for Life. An antidote to Chaos.
- **Dr Gad Saad** - The Consuming Instinct.
- **Dr Gad Saad** - The Parasitic Mind. How infectious ideas are killing common sense.
- **Jordan B. Peterson** - Beyond Order.

Quite a nice symmetry, a natural order from Chaos even :)

You can learn more about Jordan B. Peterson 

Beyond Order

I don't often read two books in a row from the same author or even on the exact same subject, but
I find Gad Saad so interesting I've done just that again this month.

You might have noticed that in January I did read both Tyson Fury books back to back, and whilst
you can't tell from the website I did also read 2x MMA books to back last year. (Michael
Bisping: Quitters Never Win and Dan Hardy: Part Reptile). But this isn't my modus operandi.

**The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense** arrived a couple of days
before I finished reading **The Consuming Instinct** and I couldn't wait to jump into the new book
so that's what I did, the very next day!

If you're a bit fed up of woke nonsense seemingly destroying every facet of modern society and
wonder how/why things are the way they are right now I thoroughly recommend you check out the
book. It's brilliant!

The Parasitic Mind

One of my most favourite personal moments these days is picking a new book to read from my ever-growing bookshelf.

Today is that day!

I've bought many books this year, far more than I will probably even have time to read this year. I've bought around
10-15 books this week covering a large variety of topics including psychology, branding, business strategy, computing
books and more.

I am addicted to reading now, and I have a thirst for knowledge to help me grow as a human being first and foremost, but
also to add some new skills to help me to make my business a success.

I have received a book delivery most days this week, and they will continue long into next week, today is one of those
days. I ordered two books by Dr Gad Saad. The Parasitic Mind is not yet with me but an earlier book of his arrived today
so I think I've got my next book picked out.

The Consuming Instinct - Dr Gad Saad

The Consuming Instinct

Just a quick update. I added the headers to the site which opt out of Google's invasive
Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

Google...FLoC Off!

I've been reading a lot this year. I like to start each day reading a chapter or two of a book
rather than doom scroll social media. I find myself to be much happier and productive when I do
this!

Because I'm reading so many books now I wanted a way to keep track, so I figured why not use this
website to keep track. So today I've added a new books page, with a simple timeline showing the
books I've read so far in 2021.

It's very simple for now, but I plan to expand it and make it a bit more useful in the future.

Please take a look and get in touch if you have any recommendations or want to talk about
something I've read.

Books!

After years of neglect I decided to completely rebuild and slightly re-design this website.

The website has now been re-built using the very latest versions of NextJS & React.

I intend to use this website a lot more going forward as I reduce my big tech/social media and
bring more content to the web on a platform I build myself.

Micro-blogging and images will be amongst the first of the new features to arrive sometime this
year (hopefully).

But this is depending on largely how much free time I can find when I'm not building
products/websites for my business Alchemist Labs.

Stay tuned!