I passed!

Got the confirmation this morning. Didn't cover myself in glory by any stretch, but I got some solid feedback to work on, and, most importantly, cleared the hurdle. Now it's only the exam between me and the title of Splunk Architect.

I really feel like I've reached the limit of what I can take by firehose. I've gotten by with informal methods and procedures to date, but, most recently, that was only with the benefit of an insight from my manager's stunningly-thorough runbook. That said, this realisation may dovetail nicely with my zettelkasten project, although that would be mean fully committing to the pursuit. On that note, a place has opened up on the Roam waiting list. However, you only get a certain number of days free now before the not-insignificant subscription fee of $15/month (IIRC) kicks in. My nascent plan is to really kick the tyres on Obsidian, and then, with my well-practised workflow, try Roam. A potential snag is this window to Roam closing in the interim, of course.


As if I needed another lesson in humility after the Architect lab, I spent longer than I care to admit debugging a 'problem' with tmux. Spoiler alert: the problem was solely between my keyboard and chair. In my defence, I was attempting to learn it for the first time. (Oh, how I wish I'd had it for my Architect lab, jumping around between eight different ssh sessions.) It looked like the key bindings weren't working: Ctrl-B, changing it to Ctrl-backslash — I can't even find a shortcut to that character in the current layout on my netbook; the nail in the coffin for that idea — had no effect; like the key binding was being seized before tmux got a look in. Enough with the suspense: have you guessed what I did? I didn't release Ctrl-B before trying to execute any of the various commands I tried. #facepalm

As with all learning, however, should you seek it out, a silver lining will usually present itself: showkey -a was new to me, and echoed all my keystrokes perfectly to STDOUT, you now won't be surprised to learn. Also, bind -p stunned me by showing the number of key bindings in bash by default. I was reminded of a few gems too: Ctrl-A for the beginning of the command line; Ctrl-E for the end. I was saving loads of time with Ctrl-R already, but these will certainly be in daily use now as well.

End of Day 31

jlj@Fosstodon #100DaysToOffload

I'm writing this as part of the 100 Days To Offload project; join us at: https://100daystooffload.com/