Probably none of this will make any sense to people, but I'm super proud of myself, so I'm gonna write about it. This is kinda a follow up post to the one I made about a week ago, so maybe go read that one for background?

Our new Helm Maintainers group has been really cranking. To date we have:
* Closed 47 pull requests as already fixed, duplicates, or no longer needed.
* Actually reviewed, updated, and merged 11 pull requests.

Our automation is supposed to release the updated Helm charts once a week, but since the developers weren’t getting around to doing code reviews, we weren’t having any updates, so the guy who set up our automation turned off the weekly releases. Which I kinda suspected after I looked at all the workflows and saw that they hadn’t been triggered in two months. So when out weekly team meeting ended early on Tuesday, I messaged him right after the call ended and asked, since we had twenty minutes free, if he could talk me through the workflows. Because there were five different workflows with “helm” in the name, and I wanted to understand which ones did what.

He talked me through all of them. And I took notes. And after I got off the call with him, I wrote up my notes in a Google Doc and shared it with the two Developer Advocates that I’m working with. Because I’m a technical writer, it’s what I do. And also, we shouldn’t be in a situation where only one guy knows how all this works. Then I was going to knock off for the day. But I’m promised myself (and posted on the Community Slack) that I’d make sure we got a release out on Tuesday. So I pushed the button. And instead of generating a new PR, it updated an existing PR that I didn’t realize was still hanging around (I’d closed a bunch of that were at least two months old). I pinged the developer and he said that was expected behavior. Then I was going to wait until this morning to merge the PR. But I wanted to push the button.

So Reader, I pushed the button.

I could see immediately that the Helm Chart version was updated in our repository. But one of the workflows was to publish the chart to another repo and to the ArtifactHub, which is where people download them from. And I didn’t see it published, even after I cleared my browser cache. I had dinner, checked back, still didn’t see it. Then, when I was really ready to finally shut down for the night and stop watching, the chart in ArtifactHub finally updated.

So I did a thing. Because we hadn’t run the workflows in two months, I wasn’t sure if they were going to work or not (we had a security incident back at the end of April and had to replace all our authorization tokens and I keep finding workflows that we missed, because we haven’t used them since then). But everything worked, just the way it was supposed to. And I published a new set of Helm Charts. Whoo hoo!

My new vacuum just arrived! A day early!

I know what I'm doing after work.

ETA - And I worked late and ran out of steam. It might have to wait until the weekend. =(

I took the vacuum apart today. I thought it was clogged because it hasn't been sucking very well. When I try to vacuum, it's more like it's just pushing the dirt around on the carpets, even though the roller is rolling.

It's not clogged.

I took the whole thing apart, and I used the long skinny brush (looks like an oversized pipe cleaner) that I bought to clean out the dryer vent to make sure that each section of the darn thing was clear. Because the last time I cleaned all the hair off the rollers, I did what I usually do and just sucked up the pile of hair instead of having to pick it up. I had assumed that pile of hair was stuck somewhere in the innards. But nope, it appears that my vacuum has just decided to stop sucking. Even though it's got a (relatively) new HEPA filter and a clean bag.

I bought this one back in 2012, and considering how many times I've replaced the belts, and what the poor roller looks like, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it's just about dead. I checked Consumer Reports, and then looked around at a bunch of different company websites to try to find the model that I wanted. I ended up buying it off Amazon (curses!) because I couldn't find it anywhere else. So I guess instead of vacuuming today, I'm going to be vacuuming later in the week. *le sigh*

Today was all about getting shit done around the house.

I washed two throw blankets/kitty blankets
I walked all the broken down shipping boxes out to the dumpster
I replaced two burnt out lightbulbs
I walked around the house with a trash bag and just picked up trash (this is a UFYH trick). And then I made sure that bag made its way out to the dumpster, because I didn’t want it sitting around the house.
I tried an internet hack that I saw somewhere. Of course, now I can’t find where I saw it, but whatever. I used four tension rods to create a shelf in the hallway above the doorway to the sewing room where I can put my stash of TP, paper towels, and Kleenex. I rather like it, and it helped clear some of the stuff that I’ve had stored on top of the dryer for ages.
I washed a ton of dishes. I’ve almost finished washing all the everyday dishes. Saturday I’ll wash the pots and pans and then start on the other things that have been sitting around waiting to get washed (the cat feeders and fountains, so I can finally put those away, some ceramic planters from my dead plants, a bunch of holiday cookie tins, etc.).

The nice thing about today is that it sets me up nicely for things I want to do tomorrow in the kitchen. Like clean the counters and kitchen sink (have to deal with the dirty dishes first) and cleaning the stove top (need to clean the pots and pans first).

Now that it’s summer I’ve found that I have more energy to Get Shit Done. (I’m apparently solar powered) So I’ve been slowly picking away at getting Frogholm cleaned up. It helps that I’ve had more time off recently. I had Thursday June 19th off for Juneteenth (new Federal holiday) and then the following Monday, June 23, as one of our five company shutdown days. And this week is another four day week for Independence Day. The really nice thing about three day weekends is that even if I spent a whole day doing nothing, I’ve still got two more days off to attempt some housework. Lately I’ve been pretty good at keeping up with the dishes and laundry, (and reading Dreamwidth) which means I’ve had enough time to start tackling some of the many, many things on my lengthy To Do list around the house.

For example, I’ve got two broken towel rods in the bathroom. One pulled out of the wall, so it needs to be spackled before I can reinstall, and the other I grabbed onto when I slipped in the shower last summer (so I managed to break that one). They’re cheap wooden ones, the cheapest ones you can buy at Walmart, as I discovered when I started looking at Home Despot and Lowes websites, because I knew I’d seen them somewhere. Anywhoo, the Good News part is that when I found them on the Walmart website, it said something about “Fulfillment through [Other Company]. And since I’d rather not spend money at WallyWorld, I went to the Other Company website. Where they were the daily special and ONE THIRD of the price! Go me! Once those arrive, I’ll spend a day on bathroom refurbishment (replace towel rods, wash the shower curtain and replace the liner, new toilet seat, etc.)

This weekend I’m hoping to spend some time sorting through some of my many boxes of papers. I’d just toss them, but I know they need to be sorted first, and in some cases things really should be shredded. So I’ll work on that this weekend. And try to shelve some more books and maybe cull some of the herd to donate. My other project goal this weekend is to buy some houseplants. So that I’m not the only living thing in this apartment.

After work tonight I drove to the Post Office and mailed the bills. Then I hit up Target, and Staples for supplies for a couple of other things I want to get done this weekend. And then went to Wegmans to grocery shop, because I didn’t go last Friday and I was out of milk and down to my last yogurt. But that means I don’t have any excuses to leave the house Friday. So I can get cracking on the housework.

It feels so good to be moving forward again after treading water for way too long.

That feeling when you take your little morning walk.

And realize when you've finished, that your FitBit was on the charger and not on your wrist.

Oh well, at least my body knows that I walked, even if my FitBit doesn't. And that's what counts.

First a little backstory, for the non-technical people in my reading audience. I’ll try to keep it brief.

You may have heard of virtual machines? They are software that mimics a laptop or server. So for example, you can have a Windows laptop, but run a Linux virtual machine on top of it if you want to. And the VM behaves exactly like a Linux laptop would. Well, the next software evolution from VMs is a container. When you create a VM, the virtual machine contains all sorts of things that you might not need. The same way a new laptop has all sorts of programs you might never use (in my case it’s browsers that I don’t use, and all those games). When you create a container, you only install the exact software that you need, and nothing more. So they’re much leaner/smaller, and you can run more containers than you can VMs on the same hardware. The most popular software to manage containers is called Kubernetes, and the most popular way to install containers on a Kubernets platform is using Helm Charts. OK, that’s the background.

At my current job we support Helm Charts for customers to install our software. BUT, we don’t use Helm Charts when we install our own software internally, we use something else. As a result, since we don’t use Helm Charts, the engineering team doesn’t really know diddly squat about them. And even our most experienced Engineer is intimidated by Helm, and complains that he doesn’t understand it. BUT our customers use Helm Charts, and they have to install our product using Helm charts. I’m sure you can see where this is going, can’t you?

When we have a release and update the Helm charts, we often do it badly so that there are bugs, or even worse the software can’t install. So our open source customers then have to log bugs. And they submit fixes because sometimes the problem is obvious. Or they write new features, because they need to be able to configure something we hadn't thought of. But the Engineering team pretty much ignores the issues, and somehow never get around to reviewing their code submissions until either I beg them to or someone from the community finds someone’s name or email address and pesters them personally. People tweet at us. One guy tracked people down on LinkedIn and sent them messages that way. It’s a mess. And it’s embarrassing and makes us look bad.

My Developer Advocate buddy Jay had an idea a while back to form a group of volunteers from the Community to tackle the problem. And then the idea went nowhere for a couple of months. When we met up at the offsite in Madrid, we decided to resurrect the idea and see if we could get the team to let us try it for a three month pilot program for a Helm Maintainers Group. This time we got the approval. Whee! We have two developer advocates, myself, and three Community Champions, people who we’ve already recognized for helping out in the Community, answering questions on the Community forum and Community Slack and submitting bug fixes. I don’t know much about Helm (yet). But it’s a skill I’d like to add to my toolbox, so I have a couple of books and I’ve signed up for a couple of online courses. For the time being, I’m around because I have permission to push buttons on the repo that only employees can push.

We had our kick off meeting last week (Tuesday the 24th) and then I spent the rest of the week going through and getting all the Helm Charts pull requests into a Google Spreadsheet so that we could triage them. Starting out we had something like 135 - 140 Pull Requests waiting to be reviewed. Between Jay and I, we’ve already closed about 45 as either too stale or no longer needed (because the fix was already in the code). One of our Community champions has started working his way through the spreadsheet, and I’ve already merged one PR for him. I saw him commenting on a lot of other PRs, asking for changes or asking people to update to the latest version of the code. So he’ll probably get through all the extra small ones this week.

I’m so excited that we’ve gotten so much done in only a week. Yeah, we do still have about 90 PRs to deal with. I’m hoping that we can get through all of the biggest ones in the next month or two, and then maybe we can work on some of the backlog of issues and bug reports.

https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a38146699/can-you-cure-motherhood-burnout-the-germans-seem-to-think-so/

By giving exhausted moms a paid time-out, the Germans may have found the remedy for what ails you—if what ails you is the stress of raising a child.

I had been parenting alone for the better part of two years when my doctor, after repeatedly treating me for fatigue, decided to write a unique prescription. A cure, as they say in German. Taking in the air, as we once said in English.

Whatever you call it, the treatment felt luxurious to this American: a three-week time-out with my kid on a quiet, car-free island, paid for by my insurance company. We would stay in a dormitory and I, along with 24 other exhausted mothers, would be taking classes on things like budgeting and stretching as a means of self-care. There would be day care and housekeeping and meal service, so we could concentrate on our lives beyond work and domesticity.

***

The cure, which got its start in the rubble of World War II, had been approved for more than 47,000 people the year before the pandemic; another two million people are estimated to be in need of one. Raising a child is clearly exhausting, especially under these circumstances.

Elly Heuss-Knapp, the wife of Germany's first postwar president, knew this firsthand; raised by a single father after her mother had been committed to an asylum, Heuss-Knapp introduced the concept of sending stressed out mothers to rural places for retreats in the early 1950s. In doing so, she enshrined the needs of women, hundreds of thousands of whom were widowed or dealing with traumatized husbands, into law in a newly formed country whose Constitution did not prioritize the rights of women. After such profound social disruption, the women (who were themselves often traumatized after surviving the war) needed a quiet time-out to grieve in peace and regain a sense of normalcy. Whole towns grew up around these dedicated "cure houses," and these retreats were enshrined in law.

I love this idea, that a culture can recognize that mothers are stressed out. And then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.