Tuna Research Reflection

Three years and four days ago I set out on a research project, and since then I have not provided any updates on results.

FYI, Tuna is a reference in the show Great Teacher Onizuka.

In the show, the great teacher has an enormous debt and resolves himself to a year of tuna fishing to pay it off.

In the context of a LDI project, Tuna represents unknown fields that I hope to improve in and such "research" is aimed to deliver answers and results. Tuna Fishing Exploratory Research will be shortened to Tuna Research. Learning never ends, so this project will go on indefinitely.

Here are some recent results{
To solidify my goals: I really liked the concept of being a full stack developer, but I have found it more rewarding to gain experience in backend development. Currently, I am a big data engineer. My eventual goal is solutions architecture with a specialization in big data.

To improve the process of self learning: I have the desire to constantly be improving. The most capable people that I have met, have consistently had the trait, that they were knowledgeable and reliable. I have attempted to emulate and adapt those positive traits. I have come up with a few strategies to optimize the path towards self improvement. Through the use of flashcards, online and offline resources, I have been able to improve more per hour invested than ever before.

To develop a system to track and achieve small to major goals: When I first started out this research project, I aimed to develop an in house task tracking system. This is no longer a priority, having enhanced my personal workflows. I have leveraged the capabilities of Google tasks to the maximum. I have found that I have been able consistently start on and clear goals by listing out my priorities.

To maintain a reproducible development environment: I have optimized, proven and/or automated backup strategies for configurations, and personal workflows. At the present, I have been able to reproduce development environments across multiple machines in a semi manual manner. Current limitations is that configurations are not fully automated. This is an area that can still be improved, through learning Docker and configuration management tools.

To stand up my own virtual environments for development and operations: I have desired to run my own servers for many tasks. I currently have dedicated virtual machines, both local and remotely with services for data storage, version control, domain name resolution, proxying, and virtual networks. I have managed to tune miserable hardware for analytics usage in order to keep my data engineering skills sharp. I plan to migrate it my homelab as I have time.

To achieve cohesive file transfer: One hindrance towards the LDI project acceleration was non-interoperability of internal file systems. To maintain separate Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux environments led to challenges in personal workflows. Taking steps to resolve this issue, I have phased out usage of Windows and OSX in favor of Debian based setups. I have utilized Veracrypt, SFTP & LUKS for encrypted cross system data persistence. The result is that I am able to transfer and securely backup files across any of my personal computers and any remote servers with ease.
}

Technical direction

A goal of mine is to maintain my own organic revenue stream. Currently, I have earned funds migrating local businesses of monthly service contracts to LDI managed web properties. This kind of service does not contribute towards my long term goals. My ability to work on newer projects is currently limited due to:

• Data transfer
• I've consolidated a lot of data from multiple systems into Window's bitlocker encrypted setup.
• I'm not able to access that data from other operating systems
• I am highly dependent on Windows, which has very random restart policies. 
• I have procured multiple computing devices, each with specialized intent.
• Some devices are rarely utilized due to file transfer limitations, and most are not utilized to full effectiveness.
• My current ability to achieve results is heavily reliant on an unorganized and unreliable windows setup.
• Direction
• I currently have minimal direction on personal projects with almost no concrete plan and documentation.

To help achieve and complete some of the goals that I have targeted, I want to purchase a used server and auxiliary components.

• This is not a rash decision because:
• These purchases will be expensed to LDI.
• Learning is always expensable.
• I will donate personal funding to LDI to offset excess expenses.

Silver Dragon

Defacto mascot of Little Dragon Inc, inc. [ Littledragoninc inc. ]

My retirement as a professional blogger and full time student.

I have met all graduation requirements. With this completion, I should be set to not ever need to learn anything again. /s

This is the end of the series on personal educational goals. I will stop using this blog as my personal diary as this likely goes against the endorsement policies.

As for the status of Little Dragon Inc, I will also step down from a few positions after the restructuring/reorientation planned within the next few weeks in order to focus on adapting and planning for reality.

-mm

On Tuna Fishing Exploratory Research

Since there is a month of free time before the next section of courses, I think it would be a good use of time to start off a new section of research. Although I have already put up placeholders, this post will mark the formal start of the Era of Tuna Fishing Exploratory Research.

I've utilized a certain task tracking system to keep track of things that needed to be done. The tools have worked relatively well for small to medium sized projects and tasks but has failed spectacularly for anything larger.

The large scale tasks are generally personal projects or learning objectives that one cannot finish off in a few days. As such, my current tracked tasks is filled with such things. (Some are likely further back than four years!)

I've decided to base this Research Era on the theme of tuna, in deference to one of the most noblest fish of the seas. The goal of the Tuna Research is not to produce a single tangible result as in the case of the temporarily stalled Hourse Research Project, but to harvest as many of these "Tunas" as possible. Using what I have learned from that earlier mentioned project, I will attempt to develop the skills and methodologies in order to maximize the rate of Tuna extraction.

Further developments on Tuna Research can be found at here.

Disclosure.
This current path is partially inspired by fish based themes in select media.

Added OPEN to Littledragoninc.com

OPEN will be the list of all (mid sized or higher) extracurricular projects.

Click here to open up OPEN.

Shift to square corners

The following are two setups of the site. Squared edges seem to look better.