Even though I didn’t think it would be possible, I’ve actually started waking up at roughly 5am every morning. The most immediate effect is that come 8pm I’m absolutely spent. But on a more positive note, I do feel that I have more time available to me. It’s odd because this time seems to have just magically materialized out of nowhere. But honestly it’s probably the time I used to spend lounging around the house in the evenings doing nothing. By waking up earlier I feel more focused and have time to read Hacker News and even do a little reading for work!

On the topic of reading for work, we’ve been studying various message queueing technologies recently. While most people at work seem to be enamored with ActiveMQ I’ve gone off into the weeds and have been reading through the ZeroMQ guide. If it’s possible to fall in love with a toolkit then I’m officially smitten! I haven’t gotten a chance to do anything beyond reading about it at the moment (my time is a bit short), but conceptually ZeroMQ seems to have so much potential! Maybe it’s just that ZeroMQ’s guide is so well written? From the ZeroMQ Guide:

ØMQ socket is what you get when you take a normal TCP socket, inject it with a mix of radioactive isotopes stolen from a secret Soviet atomic research project, bombard it with 1950-era cosmic rays, and put it into the hands of a drug-addled comic book author with a badly-disguised fetish for bulging muscles clad in spandex. Yes, ØMQ sockets are the world-saving superheroes of the networking world.

That’s right at the beginning but the humor continues throughout the document. When you’re reading about implementation patterns  that might be applicable to your network topology a little bit of humor is always welcome.

Anyway, time to go do some more reading. I’ve put ZeroMQ aside for the moment and am going to start reading up on RabbitMQ now.