Recent content on Joris Roovers
Like many techies/makers/engineers/<insert your flavor>, I suffer from a condition in which I endure (total) chaos in parts of my life while having a mild compulsion to over-structurize, organize and track other areas of my life 🤷♂️ Enlarge Alex Vermeer’s 8760 hours review process is really exhaustive - I highly recommend it. Alex Vermeer’s 8760 hours review process is really…
Inspired by 13 15 Things I Believe by Bob Sutton. Integrity above all. Make sure you can always look at yourself in the mirror. Be truthful to yourself. Don’t have hidden agendas. Do the right thing. Even if it's hard, even if it means killing your darlings, even if it makes you look bad. Be courageous: "no guts, no glory". Always go all-in. Deeply care about what you do. Be passionate.
One of the bitter-sweet things of 2020 is that with nowhere to go, a lot of the time normally spend on out-of-home activities (travel, holidays, visits, etc) suddenly became available to invest elsewhere. For me, a lot of that went towards various side-projects. When looking at 2020 with a focus on just those side-projects, it might just be the most productive year I’ve ever had. An…
After last year’s edition, I thought I’d also write an overview post of my 2021 side projects. It’s been quite a year again! Family +1 👨👩👧👦 I can’t start a yearly review without a mention of my son being born mid-August, a big life milestone and “project” on its own. While we’re still finding a new balance with 2 kids (they can be a lot of work!) and everything else (work,…
Here are a few things I’ve starting doing throughout the years that I’ve found had a real effect on my job performance in a big corporation. At least half of these I’ve learned through others and a good amount of them seem more like common-sense than big revelations now, but hindsight is 20/20. I hope that some of these might be useful to you, even if it’s just one! Make…
About Joris Roovers I’m a seasoned engineering leader working @ Cisco, leading organizations working on platform and infrastructure automation using Cloud Native technology. I’ve held both senior management and technical roles. I’m passionate about leading globally distributed software engineering teams and building a culture of trust, purpose and engineering excellence. I…
This is the first post in a multi-part series: (Part 0: My Smart Home 2021 - A Home Assistant Love Story) Part 1: Intro & Smart Housekeeping Part 2 (next month 🤞): Smart Kitchen Part 3 (future): Smart Garden Part 4 (future): Smart Future Enlarge I want a Rosey in my life. Source: The Jetsons Fandom I want a Rosey in my life. Source: The Jetsons Fandom Home Automation has come a long way in the…
In the tech industry, we’re always told to embrace failure and fail fast (or fail early, fail often). I’m a big proponent of this myself (see 13 Things I believe). However, this doesn’t mean that failing is easy. In fact, coping with failure and personal failure in particular is incredibly hard for most people. The ability to quickly rebound from (perceived) failure is probably…
About 8 years ago, I decided to go paperless: removing as much physical paper from my life as possible, favoring digital copies stored in the cloud instead. The benefits are obvious: easier searching, organization, sharing. Cloud-stored documents are always accessible, cannot be physically physical damaged or lost and are more future proof in general. Here’s how I do that. Storing files on…
Back in 2015, out of frustration with poor git commit messages I kept seeing, I wrote a bash script to enforce some standards, based of community best practices and guidelines I thought were important. After porting the script to Python, putting it up on github and a mention on reddit, it started getting some attention. A few years and hundreds of hours of effort later, Gitlint now has a small but…
This is the third consecutive Year in Review post (2020 and 2021), and what a year it has been. The new reality of having 2 small kids in combination with out-of-home activities picking back up after the pandemic meant that more than ever 2022 became a year of Letting Go. Yet, despite much reduced project and personal time, when taking a 12 month lens I’m pleasantly surprised how much still…
This is the fourth consecutive Year in Review post (2020, 2021, 2022), and it’s been another very busy year. After last’s year of Letting Go (refinding balance after emerging from the pandemic with 2 young kids), this year became a year of Discovery. An overview. Tasting the Digital Nomad life, with a family Enlarge Our 2300km roadtrip from home (Breda, Netherlands) to our AirBNB in Portugal…
A few times a year (such as during annual reviews), I go through a backup routine. This gives me peace of mind that all our data is stored redundantly - a computer or hard drive failure can never lead to permanent data loss. Cloud first, Offline second Enlarge Overview of my backup process - details in this post! Overview of my backup process - details in this post! I live by a cloud-first…
Even with the web at your fingertips, it takes time to research and combine information in a way that makes sense to you or that is relevant in your current context. I’ve learned that the ability to quickly retrieve summarized and contextualized information, is a large part of what people mean by “having experience”. For most of us flawed humans, that’s impossible without…
Here are my favorite automations I’ve implemented with casa, my home automation stack. 1. House Modes: Home, Away, Sleep When switching the house mode to Home, Away or Sleep, the lights, music and cameras around the house are turned on/off automatically. 2. Evening mood lights An hour before sunset (changes with the seasons) the house is set to Evening mode and most of the lights around the…
Enlarge I got myself the AnyCubic i3 Mega S, an affordable entry-level printer. Tweet I got myself the AnyCubic i3 Mega S, an affordable entry-level printer. Tweet A while ago, I got myself a 3D printer. While I’m still unmistakably a novice, I’ve already found it an incredibly useful tool in my Maker toolbox while also developing a small CAD modeling passion along the way. If you…
TLDR: I made a bunch of changes to my Home Assistant setup. A high-level overview of the changes (and rationale) is provided in this post. Details, code and config can be found in my casa repository on github. This post was featured on Hackernews! It’s been a year since I presented at the first Home Assistant conference and 18 months since I wrote about My Favorite Home Automations. A lot…
Enlarge The inside of my infrared sauna. The inside of my infrared sauna. In early 2021, I built a single person infrared sauna, from scratch. While I have been using the sauna frequently since then, up until recently I still had to operate it manually by plugging in individual infrared heaters. As a self-proclaimed home-automation aficionado that’s obviously not something I could let slide.…
I do most of the cooking at home, yet never really learned how to cook. Truth is, I still mostly just wing it, while trying to balance speed, taste and variety. Here’s a few things I’ve learned over the years that I now use all the time. No complex kitchen wizardry, just practical tidbits and thoughts for fast, everyday cooking. Ingredients Frozen herbs Many herbs can be bought frozen in…
In early 2020, I decided to build a 1m2 mini workshop to address the mess that was my mechanical tool “organization”. A result of the realization that the hassle of finding and setting up tools is what often held me back from actually building things. Looking back, I can say that’s definitely true - that mini workshop project was the start of a bigger maker journey that I’m…
Apple Airpods: I was an early adopter when these came out in late 2016 and immediately loved them. The range and reception is impeccable, the battery life more than decent and the lack of wires feels liberating, especially when working out. If you haven’t tried wireless earbuds, you really should - they’re game-changing. The Airpods (pro) are arguably the best-in-class. Orbitkey Key…
TLDR: I built a small 1 person infrared sauna from scratch. This post describes the design and build process and some of the things I learned. Lots of pictures along the way! Ever since I was a kid, I’ve enjoyed saunas. For most of my life though, saunas have been holiday pleasures at hotels and rental homes. That was until my parents got themselves an infrared (IR) sauna a few years back.
In the last few years, I’ve been closely involved with various Software Development LifeCycles (SDLC), DevOps and Agile transformations, and internal Developer Enablement and Developer Relationship (DevRel) teams. One of the things that has come up every time, is the need for a good Software Engineering Capability Taxonomy. A list of competences and supporting technology an organization…
Inspired by Some tiny personal programs I’ve written by the ever so great Julia Evans, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of my own tiny personal programs. These programs are at the intersection between automating a tedious task, having fun, learning something new and not worrying about quality. They often serve a very specific purpose and are really intended just for me - if they…
This past February (2023), we decided to pack our car, drive 2300km south and work remotely from Portugal for a month. With 2 young kids (18 months and 3.5 years). Here’s how that went. Why? Enlarge The view from our rooftop terrace. We were a 3 minute walk from the beach. The view from our rooftop terrace. We were a 3 minute walk from the beach. Escaping the rat-race: The big picture is…
The act of releasing is something all software engineers deal with. Obviously, context dictates everything here: an on-prem software product that needs to be deployed in 100 different flavors on as many different customer sites requires a very different process than a multi-tenant SaaS product, which is very different again from a mom-and-pop webshop or an open-source command-line tool. Regardless…
Writing blogs requires (a lot of) sustained effort and unless you’ve got a large following, there’s often little immediate return or feedback after posting. While that can be demotivating at times, I think it’s still a worthwhile endeavour. Here’s a few thoughts on why I write. Motivations Enlarge You’re often your own best teacher! Tweet You’re often your own…
Productivity Tools 🎨 Enlarge SimpleMind SimpleMind Enlarge Draw.io Draw.io Enlarge Dato Dato Notion : I’ve tried many different note-taking tools over the years, but since late 2018 I’m a Notion convert. I’ve written a blog post on how Notion has become my digital brain. Things I like the most: cross-platform support (incl. web and mobile) with cloud synching, block-based…
People sometimes ask me about media I consume (and I often recommend without being asked 🙃). This page contains some of the things I recommend most (updated every few months or so). In all categories, I’ve really tried to hand-pick items and not make it just a dump of everything I consume. Websites Hackernews: My go-to website for a daily dose of technology and programming news. WaitButWhy:…
When I started this blog almost 2 years ago, one of the first posts I made was Top Media Picks - Recommended websites, podcast, video and more, inspired by kottke.org’s media diet posts. Here’s a new 2021 edition, with some of the new things I discovered and consumed since then. Enjoy! Movies and TV Series 🎥 Enlarge Make sure you’re paying attention when you start watching…
DevOps is a buzzword - few will deny that. It’s used left and right, meaning different things to different people. There are plenty of good general introductions from folks that have done that far better than I ever could. So instead of repeating that, here’s a few thoughts and resources I’ve discovered and used in the past years. Enlarge Just some of the terms that are…
Wikipedia describes Imposter Sydnrome as a psychological pattern in which one doubts one’s accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”. Imposter Syndrome has obviously always existed, but the term itself seems to have gained more popularity over the last 5 years or so. Chances are that if you’re reading this, you’ve experienced…