In the last few weeks I have been focusing on improving DragonDocs and DragonSlides interoperability. To that end, one of the things I wanted to do was reduce the number of file reads and writes, which have always been a risk for bottlenecking. As a result of the constant back-and-forth nature of reading JSON data for the API, the file reads are wasteful. Instead, I've decided to use APCu.
APCu allows me to store the JSON data in RAM rather than on the SSD storage. SSDs are fast, but RAM is considerably faster. There is a noticable improvement to the system as a result of this update too.
I moved into my current house four years ago today!
This is my first house but not the first time I've lived away from my parents house as that was in 2013 when I moved into my halls of residence at university.
It was strangely easy buying my house back in 2021 as I had saved enough money up myself (I was saving an awesome £1200 - £1600 a month at the time and had been for the last 4 years) and I got a slight discount of 5% for being a teacher so I had the deposit I needed. Buying the house took place in August 2020 where I put down my deposit for the house to be ready for April 2021. I remember it kept moving between April and June but eventually towards the end it ended up being February.
Living here has been so much nicer than living at home (obviously) and I've done a lot of stuff to the house since moving here including running a network around the house, I've had my garden done beautifully (thanks to mum), getting my loft boarded (I couldn't live without this as I'd have nowhere to store stuff), I've installed my own smart home with Home Assistant and I've now got my fabulous CleverCloset understairs storage.
I'm always happy to come home to this place and whilst I have plans to move to a different life style in the next few years, I will continue to enjoy living here.
