DEV Community: Darren Arbon

The Road to £1,000,000 - 1 Month in

Darren Arbon — Fri, 04 Feb 2022 14:47:53 +0000

My new years challenge is to experiment with ways of doubling my money each month. The catalyst behind this was hearing that if you start with £1,000 and double it every year, after 10 years you will have £1,000,000 (see earlier blog post for more information)

This year is all about trying different things, with the 10 year plan kicking off in 2023!! January 2022 I was going to be selling teaching resources from my previous career as a Science teacher. I started the month with £25, with the aim of doubling that. Getting the resources online (with TES) cost £0, and over the month of January, I sold £49 worth of resources. January 2022 challenge achieved!!!

So, what am I going to try in February? Well I am going to keep adding resources to try and increase the revenue from that platform, but I am looking at investing the money from last month to see what that can achieve. I have looked at several Stocks and Shares ISA providers. The returns are not going to double the money, but there is money to be made. I am going to carry on the research, and hopefully start investing later this month!

New Year Challenge, 2022, The Road To £1,000,000

Darren Arbon — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 11:59:13 +0000

I'm not a fan of new years resolutions. You set yourself a target which starts in January, January is cold and dark, you have little money after Christmas. Not really setting yourself up for success. I stopped setting sensible new years resolutions over 20 years ago, but this year I decided to change it into a new year challenge. More like something I want to try to do, but not beat myself up if I don't achieve.

This years challenge, find ways to double my money. Why? I read a great post somewhere which said that if you start with £1,000 and double its value every year, in ten years you'll have £1,000,000. I'm not planning on getting to the million mark, but it might be fun to have a play and see how far I could go.

2022 is the testing year. I'm starting with £25 and I'm going to try lots of different ways to double that money which I shall document here. The ultimate aim is to end the year with £1,000, ready to start the ten year, £1,000,000 plan.

For January I plan to sell my teaching resources. I quit teaching 4 years ago, but have loads of quality resources I could sell. This isn't scalable and won't get me to that million, but should easily double the £25, and with some effort could yield £1,000 a month.

For the rest of the year, I'll be doing research into stocks, shares, bitcoin and the other crypto currencies, and testing the water with those. I might try setting up an ebay shop.

I'm quite excited about what could happen, obviously I will probably also lose some money, but as I'm starting with a small amount of money, this will be less scary than it could be, but also a valuable lesson.

I'll update at the end of the month on how the teaching resources work, and whether I've achieved £25!!

My First Blog - React, Jest, CircleCI

Darren Arbon — Mon, 13 Sep 2021 19:08:14 +0000

The React application we were writing started to grow in size, as did the tests. Our repo was hooked up to CircleCI (other CI providers are available) which ran npm test for us. Things were going well, then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, the tests started failing. This lead us to identify some issues we had with our testing setup which I shall outline here.

The main reason the tests were failing in CircleCI was the linux boxes they were running on were running out of memory and falling over. The first thing we did was add a new testing call in package.json, this was test:ci and was to be run by CircleCI as part of the build process:

"test:ci": "tsc && react-scripts test --runInBand --logHeapUsage"

The --runInBand flag forces the tests to run one at a time. This slows the process down considerably so isn't ideal to have running in development (hence the new script which we configured circleCI to run). The --logHeapUsage flag is solely for debug and allows you to see the memory usage for each test suite, something that would have given us a better idea of the issue straight away.

There is also an issue with jest (our test provider) and garbage collection. Garbage collection isn't automatically done, so we needed to add this. Initially we changed our test:ci script in the package.json file to:

"tsc && react-scripts --expose-gc test --logHeapUsage --runInBand"

The --expose-gc flag opens up garbage collection from the node process. Secondly we needed to add:

afterEach(() => {
  if (global.gc) {
    global.gc();
  }
});

to the file that contains your jest setup. Both of these together enables garbage collection, thus reducing the memory used by the complete test suite.

These fixes solved our problem. CircleCI was now able to run the tests successfully!