So were 33% of the way through the 90-day challenge, week 4. One month is normally not a great indicator for personal change, but it’s good to take stock of I am. So since June 16th I’ve done 7 workouts, so ~2 a week. I was intending to do 4 a week, but it’s not been realistic workwise, plus it was my sister’s wedding.. Basically a lot of stuff came up. However, kept fairly regular to the high protein low carb dietary restriction (except my sister’s wedding, lots of cake and prosecco that day!) ...

So after writing about something a little more personal, I’m going to continue talking about data driven fitness! So, after finding out my actual statistics from the DEXA scan and not making the progress I want, I tried to go back to the drawing board. Look at the data, look at the target, set realistic goals. SO I’m going to stick to a routine that’s: Easy to do in a crowded gym - It’s hitting summer now and peak times at the gym equipment is pretty sparse. Something that avoided the super busy squat rack and bench would be nice. Something I can do at home in a pinch - Sometimes I’m tired, sometimes I’m working, sometimes I’m traveling the next day. Hell, sometimes it’s raining and I don’t want to leave the house! Something that is both a cardio and weight workout. Cardio is great, but it’s an easy way to accidentally lose muscle if you’re not careful. The same way lifting weights is great, but it’s hard to use it to burn calories. A super intense deadlifting session is short spurts of effort, and it’s estimated to only burn around 150-200 calories. Something super simple - I like the term dedicated but lazy, it’s basically how I do most of my work. I want something that’s easy to setup, but I can keep at without having to tweak to much. Easy to track progress - Something where I can see a number go up or down. With any deadline you need acceptance criteria. Weight and body fat is one thing, but that moves slowly and is hard to accurately measure. So being able to see the progress I’m making in the So I went to the data. Looking back over my weight loss for the last two years, the most I lost consistently was when I was doing a kettlebell routine: ...

Edit: I’ve edited this post a few times since it was originally written in November, but now everything’s all dandy and working I thought I’d republish it as a new post! Testing Puppet on Windows So as someone who’s been doing way more work on Windows recently, I’ve become super interested in how to do systems acceptance testing on Windows. I ended up pairing with Liam at the Contributor Summit at Config Management Camp 2015 about this, as Liam’s behind a lot of the original work to get cygwin-less Beaker working for testing. Go read his blog posts over on the OpenTable, he knows way more about the background than I do! ...

So, I started the year saying I should blog more, and so far I’ve only blogged once back in January… So I thought I’d talk about something non-techy and more personal. Health! Like a lot of people in tech, I wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of health. It’s a job culture that involves a lot of sitting on a laptop, late-nights, coffee, sweets, meals out and pizza. So I’ve been trying to improve my health and generally lose some fat, gain some muscle since about 2012. ...

Man, nothing excites and/or terrifies me more than speaking in public. Speaking at FOSDEM has been a goal of mine, ever since I learned of its existence in 2014. Such a huge event, so many people, so many awesome talks to hear. When I got accepted this year, I got the familiar feeling: joy of being accepted, the nagging dread of the upcoming event. I learnt the hard way that speaking at FOSDEM is very different than just visiting. I ended up missing out a lot of the first day because I was panicking in my hotel room doing some last minute changes to slides after talking to a few people the night before. ...