I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago explaining how I had updated the way my website got published, using a CI Pipeline. I hilariously (at the time) announced that 2020 was the Year of CI, not VDI. Since that time, things have changed. A lot.

I’ve spent the best part of four weeks at home along with most of the rest of the world as we all take shelter from the COVID-19 epidemic sweeping the globe. VDI use has rocketed and everyone I know seems to be on a Zoom call every day as corporate entities and voluntary organisations alike swap to remote working.

Changes at Toastmasters

I’ve recently taken on the Sergeant at Arms role at Worthing Speakers Club on a temporary basis. This meant that I was the person who brought all the stuff along and set everything up before each meeting - the pull-up banner, the sign-in sheets, the timing lights and so on. Rather similar to what I do on the day of a London VMUG event. I did that once at Toastmasters, I think, before the UK’s lockdown was imposed. Since then, I’ve championed Zoom within our club and we’ve seamlessly transitioned to online meetings as if this was totally normal for public speakers. I guess it is normal now. So these days, I set up Zoom meetings, make sure we can’t get Zoom bombed and help out anyone who needs to get to grips with the technology. Digital Sergeant at Arms, I guess. I also helped out with a Regional event, so I’m pitching in to keep people connected and trying to provide some semblance of normality, which everyone needs right now.

What this post is for

My CI post explained why I was revisiting my blog, I was in the middle of writing eight blog posts in a month as part of a Toastmasters project. The next part of that project was to present on it to my fellow Toastmasters and explain to them what I had learned in the process. This post is being used in a live demo of that process. I’ll be publishing it during the speech that I am giving, using the CI pipeline, to show how it all hangs together. What could possibly go wrong?

For some reason, I only have three minutes to get my point across, which is quite a challenge, being as I’ve taken the “what I’ve learned” question to a technical level, rather than saying it’s hard to start a blog or find things to write about. No point making it easy!

This blog post only exists because I am presenting remotely. I was going to do a quick overview of the process without any visual aids, work the room, try and persuade someone else there that they could start to write a blog too. Now that we’re remote I will be in front of my PC, so all I need to do is make a new post in Hugo, paste this text in to it, set it not to be a draft and save it, do a bit of Github magic and let the CircleCI pipeline do the rest….

So there you have it, Worthing Speakers, I like to challenge myself, no point just doing the basics in anything, push it to the next level and you’ll learn a lot along the way!