Big desk and a tiny win

I looked at my desk today and didn't like what I saw.  My desk is two-tier IKEA behemoth that I have had for nearly 20 years - it is super solid and probably has more surface area than any two desks in an actual office. The design of the desk wasn't the problem - the problem was the absolute state of everything on it.

Over the years the desk has turned into an total rats nest of cables and random IT gear. As of this morning it had (at least) the following items:

3 monitors, a mac mini, a raspberry pi, a laser printer,  a latte panda, a work laptop. a work iphone, a personal laptop, a KVM switch, an amplifier and speakers, a (very neglected) HOTAS joystick,  a VDSL modem and a charging station and batteries for my power tools. Oh, and there is also a half-built spider bot. My actual PC is on the floor under the desk . 

 All of this stuff has cables, and even more cables, and power bricks and supporting power boards. (I have a total of six power boards running the whole thing), and years of an 'I'll fix it up later' approach to cable management had created an ugly tangle of nastiness.

So I decided to do something about the mess.  More accurately, I decided to start doing something because by the end of day one I am still only half-way through, but I have enough working again to be able to write this blog post.

I also have an 80 litre container full of hardware that I need to either need to reinstall or ditch at some stage, but for now I revelling in the partially complete neatness.

About half-way through the tear down process today I realised that I could solve a lot of the desk issues by adding a riser to the back half of the desk (behind the monitors). This riser would a) hide a lot of cables and b) give me more surface area for IT gear.

I used to dabble in cabinet making woodwork. At one stage I did a lot of it but over the last year or two I let things slide, and the shed slowly turned from a mini woodworking shop into a junk pile (there is a pattern emerging here).  Last weekend I cleared some of it out.  It is still a work in progress but I can at least get to my workbench again (the shed is 3mx3m - it is a very small woodwork shop).

So, having cleared the shed last weekend, and with the driver of needing a shelf for the desk, I picked up my tools for the first time in what must be about two years and had a crack. And it felt goood. I had let things slide so much that I forget the simple satisfaction that you can achieve with hand tools and wood.  

My tools were still sharp. The brass-backed tenon saw that I bought as a rusty wreck in a job lot from e-bay and carefully restored still cut a clean line. Similarly for the old jack plane I had also salvaged and restored, and the shooting board I knocked together from scrap plywood. Making some saw cuts and plane shavings was fun. It felt like rediscovering a small piece of myself that I had lost at some stage in the previous years.

It took about an hour to dimension and glue the 3 parts for the riser, but that was an hour well spent.  The riser itself isn't pretty - it is literally a 1200mm board with two vertical ends glued to it - no sanding, shaping or staining (yet) - but it is the right size, it plumb and it gets the job done.  

I am looking at it as I type this.  More importantly I am not looking at a nasty rats nest of cables, A combination of the new riser and a lot of velcro has made a huge difference.

Clearing out the shed last week wasn't hard, but it was really hard to get motivated to do it. Clearing up my desk also wasn't hard but I've been putting it off for years - and the problem has been growing each time I put it off.  Forcing myself to get started with both jobs not only improved things but let me rediscover a lost passion/skill along the way.

And yes, I am giving myself massive props for a really small win because somewhere over the years I turned into someone who is much more likely to let things slide the other way, and I really don't like that. I am trying to rehab my drive to build things and to take care of the small stuff and I'll gladly take the wins along the way.

Also if I am going to be able to transition from office work to being self-employed, taking care of the small stuff is going to become really, really important. A slack, manana attitude is not going to cut it.   

(The floor under the desk is still covered with power boards, power bricks and a cable jungle, but I've ordered a cable tray to help me take care of that section of the clean-up project.  That will be a story for another day).

Leaping into the unknown

I haven't posted in a while because the work situation went non-linear. To cut a long (and very boring) story short, I am being made redundant due to my employer deciding to offshore all development.

This outcome is not necessarily a bad thing, but the the mechanics of the redundancy process as enacted by my workplace have been confusing and unnecessarily drawn out. Things career wise have been up in the air for the last couple of months, but now I have some clarity and some breathing space. 

As it turns out, I am gong to lose a job that stopped being interesting a couple of years ago, and get compensated enough in the process that I can afford to do my own thing for a few months.  I'll probably eventually end up looking for more work, but for at least six months I will have the luxury of being my own boss.

That  means that I will have time to start serious work on setting up my own online business, so that is of course what I am going to do. If it takes off then I might not have to look for more work.  If it doesn't then at least I'll be spending the next few months on refreshing and honing my full stack development skills.

I'll try and keep this blog updated with my progress, but I don't know how much detail I am going to give away yet - I want to at least get a working prototype together before I start making things public. All I am prepared to say at this point is that the business will be a SAAS targeting corporate customers, it will revolve around Augmented Reality and there is an awful lot of work to do.

One of the things I can share is the current tech stack.  The solution is going to be a multi-tier solution with an Angular front end and a dotnet core back end.  Although I have enjoyed playing with Vue and Supabase, I pivoted from them for a number of reasons:

1) Angular skills are much more marketable, and choosing this front-end framework will improve my future employability

2)  Angular is much improved from when I first started looking at it.  The more I play with Angular 19 (and Angular Material) the more I like it for building complex but maintainable front-end solutions.

3) I want full control of the whole stack, and DotNet Core Identity seems to be a great choice for building low-cost multi-tenant solutions. 

This stack should enable me to build something that starts small. but can be scaled out over time.  I hope that becomes necessary!

Anyway, I am exciting for what the next few months will bring. I have a rare opportunity to be my own boss for a while. I really want to make the most of it.

Oh, by the way. In the interim since the last post I also spent some time on getting some industry certifications in preparation for potential future job hunting.  I was able to certify as an Azure Developer Associate and an AWS Cloud Practitioner.  I also hope to study and pass the AWS Developer Associate exam before the end of the year.