Monthly Pulse: May 2025
2025-06-01 | Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Writing my post about how my views on work have changed after my layoff two years ago naturally made me wonder a lot of things about my “career goals” in general and my current job situation in particular. I’m still equipped with a somewhat traditional (read: very likely outdated) mindset that wants to stick with the current employer for as long as possible; but I also have to acknowledge that “as long as possible” likely means different things for my employer and me respectively.
Two years after having been laid off: How my views on work have changed
2025-05-04 | Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Today marks two years after I received the news of just having been laid off during a session at AWS Summit Berlin. My company emails in reverse chronological order – and the order I saw them – were: “Your GitHub access has been revoked”; “You’re impacted by the layoffs”; and “People will be laid off, and you will receive an email in the next few minutes telling you whether you’re impacted”. As I went through my emails from newest to oldest, each one before made more sense, and I eventually found out that I’d lost Slack access, as well. I essentially went from telling my former colleagues from my previous company “My job is great!” at lunch to not having that job anymore one hour later.
Monthly Pulse: April 2025
2025-05-01 | Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
My gaming habits have changed over time, especially ever since my Steam Deck arrived in early 2022. Now that the PlayStation Portal (henceforth “PSP”, even though there already is a “PSP”; but I don’t want to spell it out every single time) can stream a subset of games from the PlayStation Plus (PS+) Premium catalogue, I’ve picked it up, too. And it pushed me farther down the road towards preferring dedicated, portable gaming devices over stationary ones like a PC or a PlayStation 5. This month alone, I clocked in 80 or so hours for The Legend of Dragoon, another 8 or so hours for Coffee Talk, and now I’m chipping away at Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus & Butterfly.
Monthly Pulse: March 2025
2025-04-01 | Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
March was a month full of kicking off projects that are mostly still in progress. The largest of them is migrating away from AWS as my primary hoster, which has turned out to be more complex than I’d originally expected. Some of them however went so smoothly that they didn’t take more than a single day, like moving my backups from Backblaze to Hetzner. The complexity of each of those projects lies in the different features each provider offers, and whether I had to find another approach for something that can’t work at the new provider, because they don’t support a given feature.
Monthly Pulse: February 2025
2025-03-01 | Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
February was a weird month for me personally. Not much actually happened, but a lot of things have started picking up steam so things might be happening soon™. Or they’ll just fizzle out, who knows. That’s… not ideal for looking back at the past month, but let’s make it work somehow.
Huy Dinh
Senior Software Engineer
at Solaris SE
