plualsight profile banner As we enter week six of the Covid-19 lockdown here in the UK I am still ‘between contracts’. I’ve had a handful of video interviews but these haven’t led anywhere yet – but I’m not sitting around idle.

Notwithstanding the decorating, gardening and spring-cleaning (of office and summerhouse – I’m not trusted to attack the house itself) I have been hitting Pluralsight online tech training hard for the past few weeks. Taking the time to get up to speed with the most recent changes in .NET Core, Blazor and Xamarin were an initial target for my attention but I’ve subsequently moved on to those courses that I had bookmarked thinking – “that would be interesting/useful to look into if I ever get time”. Well now I have the time.

I’ve been digging into the world of NoSQL, PostgreSQL and Django with a view to porting an existing pet project using the latter two.

On top of all the training I’ve been performing some housekeeping on my servers (actually Digital Ocean Droplets), installing updates, running SSL Lab and Security Headers scans and even deleting a couple that weren’t really needed anymore.

I’ve even been able to do some aggressive housekeeping on my Synology NAS; removing obsolete VirtualBox images and duplicated files while refining the folder structures and configuring a decent backup to Amazon S3.

This week, in addition to hitting the job boards I will be looking at updating the NuGet packages on my deployed website projects and mobile apps and hopefully getting my Secure SMS project pushed to Github – even if it is in a ‘Proof of Concept’ form (read that as functional but ugly).