Good things happening to me in 2021

Work

My certificate — My apprenticeship certificate

I’m continuing to work for a small IT company in Cheshire called Information Catalyst, also known as ICE.

I passed my Level 4 Software Developer apprenticeship. As coursework for that, I submitted a 20,000-word treatise about my work on a program that analyses Microsoft Word documents. I don’t think it needed to be as long as that, but I like to be comprehensive and the software I’m making is really interesting.

Also at work I joined the ICE Orchestration project, which has taught me a lot about several technologies that I was unfamiliar with (Java, Eclipse, Gradle, Liferay, Grafana, MySql, etc). I’m the main developer working on allowing users to access external lists of online services from our Orchestration platform.

Personal coding

On my Latin vocabulary website, users can now input multiple words at once and find out which ones are in my dictionary. I have made a lot of progress in porting the site to the Next.js framework, which will improve performance and reduce the reliance on client-side JavaScript. I have further reduced my reliance on Excel.

On my personal website, users can toggle between two layout options.

Holiday

My parents, my dog, and I had a holiday in Northumberland. We went on several walks; visited a few castles, churches, museums, and ruins; ate a lot of food; and saw some birds (including curlew, wigeon, golden plover, and pink-footed goose). Places included Bamburgh, Lindisfarne, Craster, Cragside Estate, and Vercovicium.

Beach under blue sky with a dog running and a distant island — Warkworth Beach

Castle atop a hill on a sunny day — Warkworth Castle

Female kestrel in a recess in a castle wall — Kestrel at Warkworth Castle

Vivid red sunset over grass and puddles by the sea — Between Craster and Dunstanburgh Castle

Castle on a hill with sea and boats in front — Lindisfarne

Remains of walls of a Roman fort behind an information-board and a dog — Vercovicium

Sunrise behind a silhouetted castle and reflected in water on a sandy beach — Bamburgh Beach with Bamburgh Castle