Weekly Dev Update 11

Mentoring | Pokemon Nuzlocke | Meetups | HTTP Server Presentations

This week I began coaching a developer, went to some fun meetups, worked on my next golang presentation, and whited out of a Pokemon Nuzlocke

Nuzlocke

Last week, I got a ‘gameboy’ emulator from Anbernic. It’s basically the most interesting bit of cheap tech I’ve ever gotten my hands on. It ’emulates’ old retro game. For my purposes, Gameboy Color, Advance, and DS are the games I most wanted to visit. Specifically, I still have a lot of passion for the games I let engrosse my childhood, Pokemon. Nowadays, many people have learned to modify the original games, into bigger, more complex games. Harder, in particular. That’s how I got started this week, learning to download, modify, and install those games onto my new device. Then began a challenge in Pokemon referred to as a ‘Nuzlocke’. I won’t go into it, other than to say I was playing Pokemon Blaze Black, and lost handily to Lenora. I’m on run #6 at this point, after doing a few restarts to get a contrary Snivy. Nevermind all of that. Now that the device is set up, it’ll be taking up less time this week.

Mentoring

This week, my company had an opportunity for a new project to start up. While I have built internal AI tooling in the past, I saw the opportunity to help a younger developer out. Someone who could make a series of internal AI tools to help automate the boring, repetative tasks they do. I knew this developer didn’t have any professional experience, and likely wasn’t ready to go solo on this. So I was able to have, I suppose what I’d call, my first ‘mentorship’ opportunity. I’ll be meeting with this developer a few times a month, doing the code reviews, showing them tooling to improve interation and collaboration, documentation, testing, etc.. I’m incredibly happy to begin this project with them, as I’m actually fairly passionate about coaching & mentoring people in general.

I think this is the perfect balance for me. While the vast majority of my job is development, a portion of my week will be involved in mentoring.

Meetups

This last week I was invited to what I may call a ’tech community leadership summit’. Once a quarter we’ve been meeting to discuss how, as local tech community organizers, we can add more/better value to the community. We share resources, ideas, and overall, just try to continue to grow the local tech scene. It’s a great group of people, and I’m honored to be invited as well as feeling like I get a crazy amount out of those meetings.

Golang HTTP Presentation

I have begun ’training’ for my next presentation. The presentation is different in that it doesn’t contain a speech, or slides, it’t a technical ‘how-to’ on building an http server in Go. I love the challenge, but the vast majority of it is writing code. One of the things that may or may not be a hiccup, is writing all the code in Neovim, as it may be a bit jarring to look at. I remember Vim workflows looked very confusing to myself in the beginning, so hopefully I can find a willing test subject to see how that is perceived.

Since all of this presentation is about writing code, I think I’ll just be trying to write out the steps, in what order I think it makes the most sense to write them. Maybe I can use some obsidian slides to visually show how an http server works, and then write that code out in chunks.