I'm sounding like a broken record, but it has been yet another slow week at work. We're still having some GIT related issues - not me personally, and we're also completely redoing our build process so that has caused some expected issues.
Freelance
This week I decided to set up GPG to sign my GIT commits - just because I saw a talk about it by Ric Harvey at the Colchester Digital conference. Someone at work asked me why I go through the hassle of setting this up; I said that by spending my spare time doing something like this - next time I get a contract that requires me to sign my git commits, I'll either be ready to do with my own laptop or at least know how to get it set up on a new machine.
So, setting up GPG itself on my MacBook Pro was fairly easy - but where I ran into issues was using it with Fish shell - which I'm still learning more about as I haven't been using it for that long.
I was getting the following error failed to write commit object; to fix this I needed to export the GPG TTY in my fish.config file:
set -x GPG_TTY (tty)
Easy right! Took quite a few hours of searching and trying different things to get to that fix, once I realised it was working in Terminal and it didn't work using Fish shell.
I have now cancelled my Reseller account and can say goodbye to Heart Internet - finally. I've not been happy with them for the last few years as their service deteriated as well as their customer support, plus they are now owned by GoDaddy! I was a customer of theirs for over 10 years.
Spent a couple of hours fixing things that had broken as part of the move away from them including HTTPs issues with my friends WordPress website and I also fixed some of their CSS issues - which were being caused by the theme having hardcoded image links.
Personal
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I spent a few days writing a cover letter and answering a bunch of questions for a permanent job application - well I heard back and unfortunately, I didn't get an interview. It was expected really, they are an awesome and well-known company, had loads of applications and I knew that I didn't have all the required skills they wanted, but it was good to spend that time thinking about why I want to go back to permanent work.
I'm still not 100% sure if going back to permanent is for me, not yet anyway, I still feel as though freelance work, not contract, would be better for me - but that trouble with freelance, at least for me is that it has always been very much 'feast or famine' and that's not great when you have a mortgage and bills to pay, as well as a family to support. I plan on writing a blog post about 'Permanent vs Freelance vs. Contract' work, to hopefully help me work out what is the best route for me.