Most developers are used to being the technical support for friends and family. The latest incident that I have found was slow to fix.

My mother has a Windows 10 laptop that had started to show the “You are currently running a version of Windows that’s nearing the end of support. We recommend you update to the most recent version of Windows 10 now to get the latest features and security improvements” message.

She started to apply the suggested update, waited a while and the update uninstalled itself.

At this point I was called on to help.

I restarted the update process and it eventually prompted that a HP utility was no longer compatible and needed to be removed. This triggered a restart cycle.

At the next restart and update it suggested that freeavg needed to be upgraded or removed. I went for the simple option of uninstalling and downloading a fresh copy. Three reboots later the update manager repeated the same message about freeavg.

This was followed by an uninstall of freeavg, a restart and another trigger of the update to 1903. Again it asked for FreeAVG to be uninstalled (which was interesting as the add/remove program dialog did not include FreeAVG.

Eventually I found a freeavg stand alone uninstaller. This worked on the second attempt (hint: when it suggests booting into safe mode, it’s not kidding).

Another reboot/update cycle had the update working. It only took 3 hours from first update to fully upgraded.

I don’t know if this is expected behaviour for a mass market operating system. If I wrote code that required this level of hand holding then I would be expected to do the install myself.

How an end user that is not very tech savvy is expected to get this working is beyond me.

When I got home I looked to update my even older windows 10 laptop. The 1803 update failed with an error message to search for, and am now attempting to use the Windows 10 update assistant v1903 to get my machine updated.

Test Commit Revert is a development technique where you make a change and either commit the change or revert it depending upon test results.

I am wondering if this can be applied to deployments with a post deploy check that will rollback upon a failure. This will only work for changes that can be checked quickly.

I am now starting on another Exercism track even though I know that it’s not the fastest mentored.

I had used brew to install Rust but that did not have an updated version

The correct script is:

curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

The Rust track seems to provide skeleton code which is better for beginners than say Typescripts missing file approach.

It also has the gentle one failing test at a time approach and a nice switch to ignore the ignore flags that will make mentoring easier.

The queue is not too bad atm

When I moved house I rented a van to move my possessions. I own a car but it would not have been practical to own a removal van. I don’t need a van all the time (technically I don’t need a car all the time, but do use it enough to make owning it worthwhile).

This is the model that makes sense for Serverless. For most users it would be cheaper to just rent the service when it is needed. A key point of Serverless is that you pay when you need it and don’t pay when you don’t. This can make the staging and development environment significantly cheaper without extra effort. I have worked on cloud hosted systems that were switched off overnight (and at weekends). This gave a cost saving, but if the start process failed we could be half a day without a working test environment.

Now there are cases where if you need to use a service all the time then other options become viable. You can run a server for $1 per day on Heroku.

Would Rent Infrastructure be a better name than Serverless? This could avoid the “you still have servers” debate.

Recently I have found how quickly you can stand up useful services. My team was asked to set up an sftp server. Using AWS and S3 we now have a working system 2 days after first being asked for it.

Whilst preparing my book Development I constructed a small toolchain to assemble the ePub, mobi and pdf files.

I have chosen the “Bring Your Own Book” option on leanpub to give me the maximum flexibility.

From the project files from Development I have extracted a github project that can act as a starting point for writing another book: Writers Toolkit.

Currently the scripts to setup and build are mac centric but I would welcome pull requests for other platforms.

The build tools are based upon the wonderful Pandoc. I use this to turn markdown files into ePub and pdf files. The ePub is then converted into a mobi file for Kindle.

The only issue that I have had with Pandoc is trying to convince it to correctly form P2 paragraphs. I had been using the inline ## form for this. The other option adding —- to the following line seems to be more reliable.

I mentor the Elixir and Groovy tracks on exercism.io.

Exercism.io is a Code Practice and Mentorship site.

Students sign up to various language tracks, attempt to solve problems and post a solution (which may or not be complete) possibly with a comment (mentors do like comments).

Mentors are asked to commit to marking 10 solutions a week, which should take about an hour. However it does not matter if you can only do one per week – every little helps.

Mentoring is a great way of deepening your knowledge of a language. You will need to be able to explain ways of improving code or hints on solving a problem to someone who may:

• Not know the language
• Have limited English skills

This is a great way to practice code reviews.

There is no need to have finished a track, although it may help if you have finished one or two exercises.

Sign up now

I have just published an early edition of my book Development

https://leanpub.com/development2019